After some maintenance on the weekend, last night I grabbed some frames from M13 with my setup to try out the collimation. It’s only 20 minutes (click on image for full size) but it’s good enough. The sky was very hazy, with thin clouds and lots of dust from Sahara and ashes from the many fires that have stormed Portugal recently, but the purpose was to see the shape of the stars, and that was done.

M13, also know as the Hercules Cluster is a globular cluster of stars, composed by a several hundred thousand stars bound together by gravity, located 25100 light-years from Earth. At the telescope it appears like a small puff of cotton, with the core appearing to untrained eyes like some dirt on the glass, but with time it resolves nicely, and it’s a beautiful object to see. It can be seen with the naked eye from places with very dark sky, and in Portugal I’ve been lucky enough to see it twice from Alentejo.