Lately, you are all tired of my crying over lousy seeing, lousy weather (we just got hit by two snow storms totaling over a meter of snow), and imaging with bright moonlight.
Finally everything came together, I had a short night (before clouds cut it off) of the best seeing I've ever had. This is a time to image globulars as they see to need seeing more than any other object. Their stars really look poor on an average night -- at least my average night which runs about 3.5" FWHM. But this night seeing was 2.08" FWHM. Boy did that make a difference. Sure be nice to see that more than once every three years. In measuring the stars around the cluster I came across several with sizes of over 3". This puzzled me until I noted their position and queried NED. Ned showed a 2MASX galaxy at most of those coordinates. So some of the "stars" in this image are distant galaxies. Of course you can see many obvious ones as well, some right through the stars of the globular. There's one asteroid as well 2004 SX11 at magnitude 19.6. You'll have to go to the URL to see it however as it is above the top of this cropped version I posted due to band width limits.
NGC 5053 is a very sparse, low concentration globular in Coma Berenices located some 55,000 light years away. The Sloan Deep Sky Survey has shown it to have a 6 degree tidal tail of stars caused by our galaxy stealing its stars. That might explain its sparse star count.
For the full image see:
http://www.spacebanter.com/attachmen...tid=1849&stc=1
14" LX200R, L=4x10' binned 2x2, RGB=1x10' binned 3x3 (clouds prevented more), STL-11000XM, Paramount ME.
Rick