It has been nearly two weeks since I was last able to carry out some observing. The last few days we have had some quite hot weather for May but only last night (the 24th) was the sky free from high level cloud and good enough for me to get the Dwarf out again. Even so, I had to contend with the Moon at one day past first quarter and a less than dark sky. I was initially going to observe NGC5907 which currently has a supernova in it but there was a problem with tracking due to it being near the zenith, so I gave up with it. Instead I had a go at an old favourite, the globular cluster M13 in Hercules. This is what I obtained after 125x15s (31.25 minutes) of observation:-
The first frame was taken at 23:47 BST and the last at 00:42 this morning. The astro filter was employed and the gain was 60. Auto parameters were used in Stellar Studio. I have increased the saturation of the image in Photoshop and binned it x2. Here is a close up of the object using the unbinned data:-
This cluster has about 500,000 stars in a region which is about 150 light years across. The brightest stars seen are evolved red giants. Going back to the wider field image there is a prominent galaxy to the left of M13 and this is NGC 6207.
All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2026
No comments:
Post a Comment