The Great Globular Cluster in Hercules - M13

The image was taken on 12th May 2010 using my 8" Skywatcher Newtonian and Canon EOS550d. It's a stack of 19 30sec. exposures at ISO800, with dark and flat frames. This is my first experiment with flat frames and it hasn't been entirely successful as a gradient can still be seen across the image, probably due to the way I did it!
To the bottom left of the image is the magnitude 12 Spiral Galaxy NGC 6207, a recent producer of a type II supernova (SN2004A).

The lower picture is the same data, but processed in a different way, and shows that there are many ways to skin a cat, in fact with processing astrophotographs there are many hundreds, so the final result is very subjective and dependant on the photographer, though we all try to maintain the correct colour balance, unless doing narrowband work. Is processing a Black Art? well, certainly it could be considered an Art, the shade of black I leave to you.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

A fine, fine picture, Tim.

Anonymous said...

I see another galaxy in the frame, IC4617, about half way between NGC6207 and M13.

Tim Beale said...

Well spotted Brian. That Galaxy doesn't appear on my star chart so I didn't even think to look for it!