M13 The Great Cluster

Without doubt the finest of globular clusters visible in the northern hemisphere. Located outside the plane of our galaxy and some 25,000 light years away.

An easy target to find.

M13 is located in the constellation Hercules, between summertime’s two brightest stars, Vega and Arcturus. About 1/3 of the way from Vega to Arcturus, locate the four modestly bright stars forming the Keystone of Hercules. On the Arcturus side of the Keystone, M13 lies between the stars Eta Herculis and Zeta Herculis.

A typical binocular field is about 5 to 7 degrees in diameter, and the Hercules cluster is found about 2.5 degrees south of Eta Herculis. The Hercules cluster’s position is Right Ascension: 16h 41.7m; Declination: 36 degrees 28′ north.

M13 was one of my first targets I captured many years ago. The cluster will not have changed since it's discovery over 300 years ago,  but my imaging and processing have. This Image is just 1.5 hours of data using the ZWO RGB filters, 30 minutes per filter.

Cropped image

Processed in Pixinsight.

Elephants Trunk Nebula

So it is a school night but while the skies remain clear I will start with a couple of hours of new target data on the Elephants trunk Nebula. 3 minute subs using the Optolong narrowband filters starting with Ha. A great night of data capture using the ASI air pro I managed to capture 71 x 180 second exposures resulting in just over three and a half hours. As normal a 3 minute stretched sub is noisy but with a promising amount of data.

No processing here other than a histogram stretch.

WBPP is an incredible script that combines all the sub frames with calibration frames and does an amazing job. This is the combined efforts of those 71 frames. I have also included the starless image.

I am posting these about a month after processing, it would appear there is a brightness difference between the two. 

Update Aug 2nd. The weather has been awful for the whole of the UK and I have not completed any further progress on this project. If this keeps weather keeps up I will crack on and finish it next spring..... Further updates to follow.