A "quickie" before the clouds...

That night seemed to be a good one for some astrophoto but, while trying to obtain a good phocus with a bright star, I saw far in the horizon the nightmare of the astronomers. The clouds were starting to form in the coast and the slow winds were coming towards me so it was clear that the night was about to be ruined. With the dissapointed already settled, I decided to give a go to a target close to where I was phocusing and to take the most light possible before the clouds roll in.

M13  (Messier 13 or The Great Globular Cluster) was alredy hunted by me while starting on astrophotography. An easy to locate target in Hercules, bright and amazing as it is composed of 300,000 stars with a brightness of 5.8 and located at around 22000 ly outside our galaxy.

I only had time for 10x120" lights, and some darks and bias with the 70mm refractor (ETX-70) on a HEQ-5 and a unmodded NIKON d3100. Stacked with DSS and processed with StarTools and Photoshop.

Enjoy!

The image annotated:

And the old picture close to the new one for comparison:

Great Globular Cluster in Hercules

Messier 13 (M13), also known as NGC 6205 and sometimes called the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules, is a globular cluster of about 300,000 stars in the constellation of Hercules. M13 is located at 22,200 ly with a size of 84 ly, this means that this picture is actually a shot from the past, what we are seeing now is how M13 was 22,000 years ago when the light from its stars started its travel towards our small planet, this is simply amazing.

Its diameter in the sky is about 23 arc minutes and its easy to view from a small telescope or binoculars. This image was taken with my small ETX-70 with no tracking composed of 40 shots of 2 seconds stacked with DSS, 10 darks and 10 bias.

Nearby is NGC 6207, a 12th magnitude edge-on galaxy located at 28 arc minutes in the north east which is also visible at the top of this image. If M13 being at 22,000 ly from us and being visible is awesome, knowing that this galaxy is at 30 million ly just blew my mind. Somewhere between M13 and NGC 6207 one can imagine a small galaxy IC 4617. Again, I'm fully satisfied with what it's possible with such a small telescope but not being able to track is starting to be a serious problem...

Enjoy!

And again, the image annotated by astrometry.net: