Saturday, April 24, 2010

Messier 13 - The Hercules Cluster

Messier 13 - The Hercules Cluster

Spanning 145 light years in diameter, it consists of several hundred thousand stars and is roughly 25,000 light years from Earth. It glows at magnitude 5.8 and is visible to the naked eye from a dark site on a clear night. Binoculars even yield a good view of the cluster size and structure.

I cropped this to show the tiny spiral galaxy located at the upper edge which I believe is IC4617.

This was a quick capture of 3 x 360 seconds at f/6.3 with the C8 Ultima. The usual setup.