Rory Glasgow Globular Clusters

Messier 13

It’s been raining a lot lately, but one night I was able to take advantage of a short window of clear sky before the humidity got too high. Here are some images of Messier 13, the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules. These are a combination of 436 15-second exposures at a gain of 60 on the Dwarf 3, totaling 1 hour and 50 minutes of integration time. The images were processed in Siril.

Messier 13

Messier 13 orbits the Milky Way and is between 22,000 and 25,000 light years away. It is 145 light years across and contains between 300,000 and 500,000 (or more) stars.

Wide-angle view

Two background galaxies are visible in the image.

Galaxy NGC 6207 is easy to find in the upper left of the image. IC 4617 is the little sliver to the lower right, located next to a pair of stars.