A scorching hot night. Camera won't cool below -25C. Half moon. Horrid seeing. Thin high haze. But we'd just replaced the Hederick focuser (after 5 years of noble service), and wanted to do a quick holiday snap to see if the system was working.
NGC 288 is a smaller, sparsely furnished, mag 8.1, very lonely globular cluster near the south galactic pole, and at the edge of the binocular field if you're looking for NGC 253.
Easily resolvable right to the core. Its main redeeming feature as an image is that there are two very distant spiral galaxies shining through, one at the top, one at the bottom. There seems to be a whole cluster of distant red ellipticals shining through the left-hand edge.
Due to the ghastly conditions, there's probably not much point giving a link to the
original, but we thought it was a different diamond to snap on a hot later-than-August night.
Aspen CG16M on 20" Planewave. RGB each 3 subs at 30min. Field about half a degree.
(PS: PlaneWave shipped the new focuser very promptly by ordinary post. Removing the old one and reinstalling was a breeze, albeit 2 metres up a ladder with shaking knees. No shims to mess around with. Just accurate machining.)