M79 Globular Cluster in Lepus

Scope: C8 at  f/5 Location: Dos Picos Park, Ramona, CA;   14  Jan. 2005; Camera: ToUcam SC3

Exposure: 28 x 10 sec and 18 x 32 sec exposures with IR filter 12 x 24 sec each RGB exposures.

Processing: Images were captured in K3CCDTools 2. Aligned/stacked in Registax 3 and saved as FITS. Luminance and Color channels were scaled and rough color balanced in IRIS. Channels were co-registered in IRIS. The 32  sec  exposure was used as the base Luminance channel. The shorter Luminance exposure was normal combined with mask to control star size  and desaturate the cluster core in the Luminance channel. Luminance and Color FITS were combined in Photoshop with Luminance Layering. Color balancing and final touches in Photoshop. SGBNR (PixInsight LE) was used to smooth background noise on the  final result. Resized to approximately 800x600.

This image was guided. M79 is a somewhat small, dense globular cluster.  Seeing was somewhat poor this evening, but the general structure of the cluster comes through.  Horizontal FOV is 16'

All images and content remain the property of Jim Thommes - copyright 2003 - 2012

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