M10 in Ophiuchus, June 14, 2021

In southern Utah we have had some good weather news and some bad weather news. The good news was that after missing the summer monsoons for two years and suffering extreme drought we finally got a good amount of rain starting in July. We have lost about a third of the surrounding pinyon and juniper trees in the last few years. They have been suffering from a general drought for 20 years and the recent complete lack of summer moisture was doing them in. But the rain brought an obvious reprieve. The bad news is all the smoke from California. The drought and smoke along with record heat felt apocalyptic. Neither drought nor smoke nor heat is any good for astrophotography, but all-the-same, we were very glad to have the rain.

As a result, I have not been getting shots from the observatory for a few months. Back in June, on my son’s birthday, as it happens, I got one night of LRGB frames of M10 and it was enough to put together this photo. The birthday must have made for the karma.

M10 is a globular cluster, one of the almost mini galaxies hovering around the Milky Way. This one is about 15,000 light years away and, like all globular clusters, is very old. At over 11 billion years it is getting up there towards the age of the universe. Some of the stars are newer, however, and are thought to be result of old stars colliding and reforming. The bluer stars in the cluster are probably such things.

From Astrometry.net

• Date: June 14, 2021
• Torrey House-Alpenglow Observatory
• Exposure: 3 hours 40 minutes
○ H-alpha (Hα) – None
○ Lum – 8 X 480 seconds = 64 mins (1×1)
○ RGB – 26 total X 360 seconds = 2 hrs 36 mins (2X2)
○ Dark, flat and bias calibration
• Mount: Paramount ME
• Telescope: Telescope Engineering Company TEC-140:
○ Aperture 140 mm
○ Focal length 980 mm
○ Focal ratio f/7.0
• Camera: SBIG ST-10XME
• Guider: Unguided
• Software: The SkyX, CCDAutoPilot, CCDStack, Photoshop CS5, ProDigital Astonomy Tools, StarSpikes Pro 3