4rd September 2004
Globular cluster
Magnitude: 6.6
Size: 12.2'
Right ascension: 16h 57m 23s
Declination: -4° 6' 24"
Constellation: Ophiuchus
200mm F5 newtonian @ F3.3, SC1.5 toucam
80mm F5 refractor @ F10 guidescope with SC1 toucam and GuideDog
I captured 100x5s frames plus 50x30s frames of the core area in k3. These I debayered in AVIRaw and stacked in registax and adjusted curves in photoshop. I then layered the unsaturated centre of the 5s image over the deeper 30s image. At that point I felt the cluster looked a bit lonely on its own. So I worked my way around the cluster, using k3 to capture 25x10s frames of the 8 immediately adjoining "fields of view". These I debayered in AVIRaw and converted to bitmap in k3. I then used iMerge to create a mosaic of the surrounding starfield that I then opened in photoshop (via NeatImage to take the edge off the noise) and balanced the colours and fiddled the curves until most of the joins had been hidden. Then I layered in the core image, sharpened up a bit and resized down to 1024x726
Location: Curdridge, Southampton, UK. 51N 15W.
Details of equipment and
method.