(c) Skyhound

I imaged these clusters with iTelescope T21 on the night of April 26th with a waning gibbous moon in the sky. M53 is on the right and NGC 5053 is on the left. I created a two-image mosaic, each of which combines two five-minute exposures in the Red filter, and three three-minute exposures in the Blue. I used SkyTools 3 to plan the observation. In addition to calculating the best times to expose, and giving me confidence that the observation could be done in moonlight, SkyTools helped me determine that I should expose deeper in the Red filter under these conditions to get a more color-balanced image. The colors in these clusters are naturally somewhat mild. The images were stacked via DeepSkyStacker. All other processing was done in Photoshop. The green channel is a 50-50 combination of the red and blue. In the bottom images north is to the left and east is down. The top image has been rotated arbitrarily. 

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