I sometimes think that globular clusters don’t get the love they deserve. Many times, they are just tacked on after a primary target at the end of the night. Or they are barely given any time during bright moons. I gave the most magnificent globular cluster in the northern hemisphere, M13, 29 hours to show its grandeur. Globular clusters present a different challenge when processing, as trying to show the high dynamic range of the cluster members is tricky.
M13 is a pretty bright globular at an apparent magnitude of 5.8. In very dark skies, you could probably see it with your naked eye. It lies 22,200 light years away in Hercules. Its estimated member count ranges from 300,000 to 500,000 stars. Its diameter is 145 light years, and its angular size is only a little smaller than the full moon. Near the core, the density of stars is one hundred times that of our solar system’s stellar neighborhood. Imagine standing in the backyard of your house but around a star at the center of M13; there would be almost 50,000 bright, naked eye stars visible to you every night!
Quite noticeable in the upper right is NGC 6207, a beautiful spiral galaxy that lies 41 million light years away.
There are a slew of other galaxies present in the image,
such as IC 4617 at a distance of 264 million light years, left, and PGC 2090141 at a distance of 914 million light years!
