I have a guilty pleasure: I like globular clusters. I should put more effort into more challenging classes of objects – diffuse nebulae and galaxies, but I’ve always loved GCs, even though they are easy to see. M13 is my favourite.
This was a test image last night, after a couple of days of maintenance, collimating the scope and then re-doing the mount polar alignment and pointing model.
Exposure | Luminance: 60 minutes (20 x 3 minutes) Colour: 15 minutes (5 x 1) of each of Red, Green, Blue |
Camera | QSI583wsg, with Astrodon LRGB filters, running at -15°C Image scale 0.69 arceconds/pixel (luminance), 1.38 (colour) |
Telescope | AT8RC |
Mount | Paramount MX+ |
Guiding | Autoguided with Starlight XPress Lodestar |
Processing | 32 dark frames per sequence 32 flat frames per filter Sigma-clip mean combination on the darks and flats Sum-combination on the light frames Aligned, combined, and deconvolved with CCDStack2 |