It may not be as big or well known as the other well known cluster in Hercules (M13), but it sure looks nice. Captured over 4 nights in July/August 2024 from a Bortle 9 zone
Places where I host my other images:
TPO 6" F/4 Imaging Newtonian
Orion Sirius EQ-G
ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro
Skywatcher Quattro Coma Corrector
ZWO EFW 8x1.25"/31mm
Astronomik LRGB+CLS Filters- 31mm
Astrodon 31mm Ha 5nm, Oiii 3nm, Sii 5nm
Agena 50mm Deluxe Straight-Through Guide Scope
ZWO ASI-120MC for guiding
Moonlite Autofocuser
Acquisition: 6 hours 55 minutes (Camera at half Unity Gain, -15°C)
Lum - 209x60"
Red - 78x60"
Green - 62x60"
Blue - 66x60"
Flats- 30 per filter
24 JimmyFlats per filter
Capture Software:
PixInsight Processing:
BatchPreProcessing (with premade JimmyFlats)
StarAlignment
ImageIntegration
DrizzleIntegration (2x, Var β=1.5)
DynamicCrop
DynamicBackgroundExtraction
duplicated each image and removed stars via StarXterminator. Ran DBE with a shitload of points to generate background model. model subtracted from original pic using the following PixelMath (math courtesy of /u/jimmythechicken1)
$T * med(model) / model
Luminance:
BlurXTerminator (correct only mode)
ArcsinhStretch + histogramtransformation to bring nonlinear
RGB:
ChannelCombinaiton to combine monochrome R, G, B stacks into color image
BlurXTerminator (correct only mode)
SpectroPhotometricColorCalibration
HSV Repair
ArcsinhStretch + histogramtransformation to bring nonlinear
Curves to saturate it a little
MLT for large scale chrominance noise reduction
Nonlinear:
LRGBCombination with stretched L as luminance
DeepSNR Noise reduction
Several CurveTransformations to adjust lightness, contrast, colors, saturation, etc.
Invert > SCNR > invert > SCNR to remove some greens and magentas
More curves
A little bit of noiseXterminator
DynamicCrop in on the clustert
Resample to 75%
Annotation