Imaging M13 Globular Cluster
June 2, 2009
The night of June 1 was decision time. Image or not. The night was clear, humidity was low and the winds were calm- perfect for imaging deep space. The only problem was the Moon. It was Waxing First Quarter and getting bigger every night. But I was imaging to the East and the Moon was still over my right shoulder. What he heck! I got the rig up, polar aligned, slipped the ST-10XME into the TMB 152 APO and went for M13, mainly to see if I could do better than last year, which was the last time I had imaged this beautiful globular. At Mag 5.8 and 20 by 20 arcminutes it was a very attractive target. I also wanted to experiment with a new piece of equipment, a Starizona Microfocuser. Two other recent images, M3 and M5 in the Star Clusters album were much better than anything I have done before, mainly due to very sharp focus. So I was curious about M13. I slewed the AP900 to Dubhe in Ursa Major and got a good star sync, then slewed to Izar, a good 2.3 Mag star in Bootes to use the Microfocuser on my focus for the main event. I got great focus, then slewed to M13, got it centered and began imaging using an LRGB sequence. Exposure as follows L: 13 x 120 sec RGB at 5 x 120 sec apiece. I had taken the darks the night before at the same temp. I processed in CCDStack today and the sharpness of the stars blew me out of my seat. I have never done work that this. After finishing up in Photoshop, I sent the JPG to my daughters who are interested in my photos and then posted it in the Star Clusters album. — Bob Gaskin