M4 (Chris Ashford)

Celestial hemisphere: Southern · Constellation: Scorpius (Sco) · Contains: 20 Sco) · 20 sig Sco · 21 Sco) · 21 alf Sco · Al Niyat (σ Sco · Alniyat · Alniyat I · Antares · Cor Scorpii · HD146851 · HD146998 · HD147012 · HD147013 · HD147105 · HD147255 · HD147284 · HD147491 · HD147592 · HD147593 · HD147648 · HD147649 · HD147702 · HD147703 · HD147743 · HD147821 · HD147838 · HD147935 · HD147955 · HD148040 · HD148072 · And 28 more.

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M4

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M4

The moon tried its best to wash out my subs but I persevered and it came out OK despite the huge variation in my sub-exposure brightness.

There seems to be a lot of gas and dust in the background - I tried to pull as much of that out as I dared. You may notice a stacking artifact in the top right hand corner - I left that there because I didn't want to crop out Antares, the fifteenth brightest star in the northern sky. Antares is also interesting because it is a red supergiant coming to the end of its life. If we're lucky we'll see this massive star cause a supernova explosion which will be spectacular. Antares is 680-800 times the diameter of our sun.

I've been volunteering at the Gunnison Valley Observatory and was looking for a good Globular Cluster as a visual target - M4 is pretty good, being bright and easy to find. M13 is too overhead and makes me dizzy trying to look up there. M4 was the first Globular Cluster to have its individual stars resolved - by Charles Messier in 1765 . Before this, astronomers thought globular clusters were comets.

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Distribution of astrophotographers

This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8001374
PixInsight job	90AK2DS7D7BB6IH4Z6KVWPTDM2K77HG2
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	16h24m01s.58
RA (top/left)	16h30m59s.99
RA (top/right)	16h22m32s.20
RA (bottom/right)	16h17m04s.82
RA (bottom/left)	16h25m33s.21

Dec (center)	-26°23′15″.10
Dec (top/left)	-26°40′14″.6
Dec (top/right)	-24°50′15″.5
Dec (bottom/right)	-26°05′15″.6
Dec (bottom/left)	-27°56′18″.5

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M4

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