M 3

A beautiful Globular Cluster in Canes Vanetici.  This was taken with almost full Moon well in the way, but I'd just completed the polar alignment of the new AP 900GTO mount, after a long cloudy and cold winter,and had to test on something. So this is really the first light of the mount setup. I  used my M25C in the WO FLT98, guided by an H9C in the VMC260L on a 900GTO mount. I only had time between clouds and the Moon's glare for an exposure of 7x120sec. The acquisition was with AstroArt and pre-processing was done there too. Final processing was done in Photoshop with the lack of flats compensated by GradX.

A larger version

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