Messier 13 - The Great Globular Cluster
Date: June 9, 2020
Cosgrove’s Cosmos Catalog ➤#0029
Messier 13 - The Great Globular Cluster - A second effort with the William Optics 132mm Platform. (click to enlarge)
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About the Target
Messier 13 - The Great Hercules Cluster is about 22-25 thousand light-years away and is about 145 light-years in diameter. This consists of a ball of several hundred stars packed together. This and other globular clusters are distributed around the outer plane of the galaxy and seem to be made of ancient stars.
The Annotated Image
Annotated image created with Pixinsight’s Imagesolver and AnnotateImage scripts.
The Location in the Sky
IAU/Sky & Telescope Constellation Map of Hercules, with M13 indicated by the yellow arrow.
The Project
Last night was almost a full moon, so I planned to work on my telescope system to tune things up. After I did this, I thought I would try M13 again. M13 was one of the first objects I shot - this effort captured 100 images at 30 seconds each. I was quite pleased with the star colors I captured - a nice improvement over my first effort. Also, note the edge-on galaxy NGC 6207 in the upper right corner of the shot. This is an edge-on spiral galaxy that is 30 million light-years away.
More Information
Wikipedia: Messier 13
The Live Sky: Messier 13
Capture Information
Light Frames
100 x 30 seconds, bin 1x1 @ -15C, unity gain,
Total of 50 minutes
Cal Frames
not recorded
Capture Hardware
Scope: William Optics 132mm f/7.0 FLT APO
Guide Scope: Sharpstar 61EDPHII
Camera: ZWO ASI1600mm-pro with ZWO Filter wheel with ZWO LRGB filter set,
and Astronomiks 6nm Narrowband filter set
Guide Camera: ZWO ASI290Mini
Focus Motor: Pegasus Astro Focus Cube 2
Camera Rotator: Pegasus Astro Falcon
Mount: Ioptron CEM60
Polar Alignment: Polemaster camera
Software
Capture Software: PHD2 Guider, Sequence Generator Pro controller
Image Processing: Pixinsight, Photoshop - assisted by Coffee, extensive processing indecision and second-guessing, editor regret, and much swearing….. Given the problems on this image, more than the usual whining….
During August and September I was out shooting every clear night. I had learned a lot of things but I was also noticing several issues that were causing me problems as I did more imaging. I decided to do something to address those issues….