M13 The Great Hercules Swarm! No Murder Hornets….I promise!
But you really do want to put this up Full Screen to enjoy the many fainter stars and the tiny background galaxies hiding in the image too!
Messier 13 or M13, aka NGC 6205 and is sometimes called the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules or the Hercules Globular Cluster.
M13 is a globular cluster with over 500,000 stars in a tight ball and is located 22,180 light years from Earth in the constellation Hercules.
The Ball of Stars is about 145 light years in diameter, it is estimated to be 11.66 billion years old.
It shines at magnitude 5.8…barely visible to the unaided eye as a fuzzy patch under dark skies.
An easy target in Binoculars or small telescopes. Absolutely fabulous in a larger diameter telescope.
I often wonder if you were on a planet around a star inside that cluster, how many bright stars you would see in your night sky?
Would they fill the sky? or Would your sky even get dark?
I captured this from my Observatories on 05-13-2021 with my Explore Scientific 102mm Triplet APO Refractor & Bisque ME Robotic Mount,
and QHY183C Cooled Color Cmos Camera, for a 105 minute total integration(21 x 300sec subs). My usual processing in DSS, Pixinsight, and Adobe CS 2021.
Best Regards,
John Chumack
www.galacticimages.com
