M13 – Hercules Cluster

I have a guilty pleasure: I like globular clusters.

(Why “guilty”? Because “serious” astronomers, according to internet groups, don’t image globulars — they are “too easy”. One is supposed to image difficult targets like galaxies and faint nebulae.)

Ok, I should put more effort into more challenging classes of objects — diffuse nebulae and galaxies, but I’ve always loved GCs, even though they are easy to see. M13 is my favourite.

This was a test image last night, after a couple of days of maintenance, collimating the scope and then re-doing the mount polar alignment and pointing model.