Sweetman Astrophotography

Continuing to go back over my older data with PixInsight, and I’m really happy with how this photo came out. This was a pretty light post process by astrophotography standards, a Graxpert background extraction, NoiseXTerminator & BlurXTerminator, color calibration, and stretching with GHS. That was it. I’m really happy with how this came out, it looks a light better than it did the 1st time I tried to processes it. This is one of the last photos I took with the DSLR, before I made the jump to the cooled, dedicated astrophotography camera.

M13 is an interesting target for several reasons. First off, it’s bright and fairly easy to see with binoculars or a small telescope. Second, it’s a globular cluster, which is also quite interesting from a scientific perspective. It’s a massive amount of starts (~500,000) packed into a really small area (~145ly). Also, these are really old stars, so how they formed is a bit of a mystery. You can read some more here. There is also now a possibility that they all have black holes at their center. I also love to imagine what it would be like to live on a planet in that system, they night sky would be packed with bright star!