With mostly clouds I decided to clean out the hard drive. I found a few forgotten files from last spring. M14 is rather low in my skies making good seeing for imaging it difficult. I'd tried several times but the stars were always too soft for a good image. Before deleting these "failed" attempts I looked through the dozens of images I'd taken. A few were sharp enough. I chose the 6 best of over 40, added the three best of each color and ended up with something worthwhile after all. Note the lack of background galaxies. Normally there'd be quite a few in an image. M-14 is in the Milky Way but even there I usually have a few faint fuzzies but there were none in this one. There must be a lot of dust beyond M14 which is already some 30 million light years distant.

14" LX200R, L=6x5', RGB=3x5' each color, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME, Calibration done in CCDSoft and AIP version 1.0. Calibrated FITS processed entirely in Photoshop CS. Scale is 1.5" of arc per pixel. Image cropped and compressed to meet bandwidth limit.

Rick

Attached Images

M14_6X5RGB3X5-67CROP.jpg (138.7 KB, 40 views)

Hi Rick.
WOW very nice. Thanks Clear skies to you Paul

Nice rich field and brilliant colours.

Kind regards
Matt

Hi Rick, with what you salvaged it sure came out pretty. Nice colors on the stars and you could see groupings of stars in the cluster itself. A very beautiful cluster. Welldone!

Nice shot! I'm glad you are having some clear skies.

Tom

This was taken last June then forgotten on the hard drive so no my skies are either rotton or so windy I don't feel I want to roll the roof. It's over 5 meters in the air so wind gets under it. It's held and is supposed to take it but we have a bridge 200 miles south of me that was supposed to take a normal traffic load and they found themselves swimming in he Mississippi. I don't trust "supposed to" any more.

It might clear for tonight but wind chill is sitting at -45. Still I might get something.

Rick