Instrument

12.5" RCOS @  ~f/9 (2880 mm fl) 0.643 arcsec / pixel.  Shown resampled to ~2.0 arcsec/pixel. 

Mount

Paramount ME

Camera

SBIG STL-11000 w/ internal filer wheel, AstroDon Filters

Acquisition Data

4/27/2008 to 5/2/2008  Chino Valley... with CCDAutoPilot3 & CCDSoft

Exposure

Lum    120 min.  (24 x 5 min. bin 1x1)

RGB    180 min.  (12 x 5 min. bin 2x2) each

Software

CCDSoft, CCDStack, Photoshop CS w/ the Fits Liberator plugin, and Noel Carboni's actions.

CCDStack to register, normalize, data reject, combine and sharpen.

PhotoShop for the color combine.

Comment

North is to the top.
The globular cluster, M5, contains roughly 100,000 stars. These stars formed together and are gravitationally bound. Stars orbit the center of the cluster, and the cluster orbits the center of our Galaxy. About 160 globular clusters are known to exist in a roughly spherical halo around the galactic center. Globular clusters do not appear spherically distributed as viewed from the Earth, and this fact was a key point in the determining our Sun's location in our Galaxy. Globular clusters are very old, with M5 being one of the oldest at a computed age of 13 billion years. Its diameter is about 165 light years, making it one of the larger globular clusters. At its distance of 24,500 light years this diameter is about 23 minutes of arc.

Source: NASA APOD & SEDS