M13 - the 'crown jewels' (Tom Gray)

M13 - the 'crown jewels'

M13 never ceases to surprise, even under less than ideal conditions. With relatively poor seeing, some high cloud/heat haze (20 Celsius at 00:30) this was not a good night for imaging...but the last in a good run, and for a few days...

At the zenith, I could just make out the trapezium that marks out Hercules' torso with naked eye, and M13 was barely visible in 9x60 finder. However, my autoguider was working well, and I had achieved my best focus for a while. Envisage dropped far more images than it retained (at only 20% quality) but I managed to achieve 14m data before giving up.

Nothing particularly good about this image, which lacks data and depth, but I am pleased with the colour - Startools 'constancy' with a little saturation and manual sampling (auto sampling tends to produce rather uniform golden stars, and I was looking to display the sapphires in these 'crown jewels'). I did not apply any sharpening, only contrast to reduce the noise, and some healing to a few hot pixels which remained after dark subtraction.

The OSC Club (One Shot Camera)
UK Astro-Imaging
Altair Astro 183 M/C Hypercams
Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope (SCT) Imagers

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Distribution of astrophotographers

This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
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Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
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Status	Basic failed
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3632926
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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