Carrying on from my previous post, the other easy target I had a look at on the 19th April was the globular cluster M13 in the constellation of Hercules.
This was the result of 7x30s at ISO1600 taken at the prime focus of my Celestron NexStar 102 SLT using a Nikon D90 camera (the first frame was taken at 22:34 and the last at 22:39 UT). I processed these images in DeepSkyStacker (4.2.6) just using the light frames and some flat frames. The resulting image has been binned x2 and processed in Photoshop. The picture below is a crop of this image:-
M13 is certainly a pretty spectacular object. The cluster is about 20 arc minutes in diameter and contains several hundreds of thousands of stars. I have included another object in this picture and that is the spiral galaxy NGC6207 which is top left. For comparison I took the following image in 2016 using the same instrument and camera (but 6 mins of exposure rather than 3 and a half):-
The images are pretty similar but the focusing on the earlier image has caused some pink edges to the stars. The way I have processed my latest image means that you can see stars of the cluster further out from its centre.
All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2023
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