Messier 5

[peter_4059]

I started this in May as a bit of a time filler while waiting for other objects to rise. It has now passed through my imaging window so I decided to do some processing today. All up I ended up with 330 subs for a total integration time of almost 17 hours - definitely overkill for this object but might as well be capturing some photons when the sky is clear ;)

Captured from Brisbane with the SN10/QSI683 on an EQ8. Processed in PI.

Big version is here:
https://astrob.in/full/cckfv2/0/

Comments/advice always welcome.

[RobF]

Holy C#$p, 17hrs Peter! Nice if that's how much data you get on a "secondary target" with Voyager and your Python automation work.

I guess you can afford to hold off until the useful seasonal window from your backyard is finished. You seemed to have scooped some faint galaxies in the background. Nicely shows the 2 populations of blue and orange stars.

With all that data wonder what would happen if you aggressively culled frames with subframeselector, and tried to the tightest "lucky" frames. With so much data you're almost able to use planetary-style techniques that only normally make sense with fast frame video data perhaps?

(and stop having so much fun!! :P)

[h0ughy]

Overkill works for me, lovely result

[peter_4059]

Thanks Rob. I will give that a try at some point. For now I'm relying on the weighted batch processing script to assign the weights well (looks like it is using FWHM, eccentricity, star count and SNR in the weighting). I haven't dug into what weights it assigns to each yet.

I have experimented with subframe selector however I haven't figured out an efficient way to use it so far - I end up searching for certain subs to remove them from the stack manually.



Thanks Dave. Good to have some data to process even if it is from light polluted Brisbane.