Messier 53

Here is a couple hours of LRGB on M53 taken at Harold Campbell. Originaly I set out to image a M106 or M95 but had some issues that took about 90 minutes to work out and by the time I was ready to go it was 10pm, not enough time to do those dim objects. I settled on  M53, It's bright enough to get a decent amount of data in 2 hours.

Still manually focusing with this new scope I was able to get a FWHM of just under 2. Better than the previous focus I had on M3 and noticeable in the rounder stars in this image.

Image details

I have 8 Luminance subs at 300 seconds and 7 RGB subs at 150 seconds.

I used flats and darks taken from the previous outing.

Images were calibrated and aligned in Maxim.

Stretched and DBE done in pixinsight.

Final star color boost in Photoshop.

No noise reduction on this one, surprising to me because I didn't have a lot of subs.

Messier 53 (also known as M53 or NGC 5024) is a globular cluster in the Coma Berenices constellation. It was discovered by Johann Elert Bode in 1775. M53 is one of the more outlying globular clusters, being about 60,000 light-years away from the Galactic Center, and almost the same distance (about 58,000 light-years) from the Solar system.

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