M3 - Globular Cluster - 01 May 2013



Here is an image of M3, a Globular Cluster in Canes Venatici (not far from Arcturus!), discovered by Charles Messier in 1764. It contains an estimated half million stars and is around 33,900 light years away.
The image, taken last night, is a stack of 50 1-minute exposures at ISO800, with darks, flats and bias frames on a Canon EOS550d, stuck on my Skywatcher 8" newtonian with a coma corrector. The whole lot was guided using PHD and a Philips webcam.  In the space of an hour I had to scrap 5 images with Satellite trails through them, which is surprisingly high given the small amount of sky I was looking at!
Stacked using DeepSkyStacker and processed with CS5 following Bill's excellent Open-Cluster tutorial guide. I can probably do a better job of this image and will try again when I have more time to fully understand Bill's methods, but I'm pleased with it for now!

The dim Galaxy in the upper right of the image is NGC5263, a Mag 13.4 spiral.

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