One of the most spectacular globular (pronounced "globe-u-lar") clusters in the sky is M5 in the constellation of the Serpent. This object visually is only slightly less impressive than the brighter M13, this object has a few surprises. One is that two of its variables reach a brightness of at least 10th magnitude stars designated as 42 and 84 in Coutts and Hogg's list. While most of the stars have magnitudes between 11 and 12, the integrated magnitude is 5.7 of all stars combined. The size of 22 arcmins puts it much larger than my 15 arcmin field. This objects color is a prime example of globular cluster stellar distributions. The main core is composed of blue super giants, surrounded by a periphery of orange super giant stars, both seen well in this image.

Processing: DDP in Maxim DL was carfully set to not quite saturate the bright central core. This was then deconvolved in AIP, and combined with the RGB image which also had DDP applied to fully color all stars to the core. LRGB combine was using LAB tecnique in Photoshop 6. I wish to thank Chris Peterson for his help in restoring the slightly trailed star images with his inovative photoshop tecnique. It can be seen at: http://www.cloudbait.com/science/shiftproc.html

Instrument:  12.5" f/5 Home made Newtonian
Platform:  Astrophysics 1200 QMD
CCD Camera:  SBIG ST7E w/Enhanced Cooling
Exposure:  LRGB = 60:20:20:36 (Synthetic Luminance = R+G+B)
Filters:  RGB Tricolor
Location:  Payson, Arizona
Elevation:  5150 ft.
Sky:  Seeing FMHW = 2.3 arcsec, Transparency 8/10
Outside Temperature:  10 C
CCD Temperature:  -25 C
Processing:  Maxim DL, Photoshop, AIP4WIN, PW Pro.