This is the great globular in Hercules. One of the first awe inspiring celestial objects I ever looked at through a visual telescope. This is my third time imaging this target and my goal was to go deep and to bring out as many stars as possible without blowing out the core. Captured over 30 hours of integration time from my ROR observatory in my backyard. Also available on Astrobin here.
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My Gear:
- TS ONTC 8" f/4 Newtonian with Moonlite CRL 2.5 focuser
- QHY268M camera with Chroma filters and a Paracorr Type II coma corrector
- iOptron CEM120 mount
- Custom fabricated steel pier mounted to a concrete pier
- ROR Observatory based on Skyshed plans
Aquisition:
- 116x180s Chroma Blue
- 120x180s Chroma Red
- 120x180s Chroma Green
- 260x180s Chroma Luminance
Total integration time: 30 hours 48 min
Site quality: On the best nights, roughly 20.4 Mag/arcs^2 or Bortle 5.0.
All Processing is in Pixinsight except where noted.
PreProcessing (all channels):
- WBPP for calibration, registration, and integration
- Dynamic Crop
Luminance:
- Dynamic Crop
- Dynamic Background Extraction
- BlurXTerminator
- NoiseXTerminator
- Histogram Transformation
RGB:
- Dynamic Crop
- Dynamic Background Extraction
- Linear fit of the three channels
- Channel Combination
- Star Alignment with distortion correction enabled (some stars had some chromatic abberation)
- Photometric Color Calibration
- SCNR green
- BlurXTerminator
- Histogram Transformation
- LRGB Combination
- Masked stretching to bring out more depth
- Curves using mask to enhance saturation and brightness/contrast
- MMT chrominance noise reduction on background (blacks) only to remove some color mottling
- Curves color/brightness/contrast enhancement
- Resample
- Watermark added (Gimp)
