Purchase Prints and Wall Art
Mother Nature has continued to make up for lost time in the last few years by blessing coastal SoCal with the most persistent period of clouds and fog in recent memory, resulting in the only May/June in LA on record without a high temp in the 80s. So I took the opportunity to turn to globular clusters - relatively bright objects relative to the fainter emission nebulas and galaxies. You only need a couple of hours of exposure (in my Bortle 9 light polluted skies) to get a decent image. And a few hours of decent sky conditions is all I could get in all of June. Probably a few more hours of exposure would have picked up a bit more diameter on the core of the cluster, as the fainter stars would become visibile, but still is a visual delight. Messier 5 is one of the larger Globular Clusters in the Milky Way, a mere 25,000 light years away from us and around 100 ly across. You can see the beautiful mix of bluish hot young stars, many yellow/orange adolescents, and probably several red giants. It contains between 100,00 and 500,000 stars according to astrophysicists' best estimates. For those with a close and trained eye, you can see the result of some backyard telescope optical physics at work near the edges - I ended up with a bit of chromatic aberration (some stars will look like red and blue versions of them slightly offset), caused by the difference in how the index of refraction and geometry of the sole powered refractive optic (a focal length reducer and optical field flattener used frequently in commercial Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes) affects red and blue wavelengths differently. To fix that for a photo print image, I can both improve the position of my image plane to be more optimally distanced from the focal reducer, and possibly break out the RGB channels in post processing, realign, and recompose the channels. But for the purposes of an online blog post and image, I think the beauty in this Bortle 9 image of M5 is sufficient! Taken with a Celestron 8SE OTA reduced to F/6.3, autoguided with OAG on EQ6-R Pro equatorial mount.
