A quick capture while the skies were clear after getting some good whirlpool galaxy data.
This is the Great Hercules Globular Cluster. 45 minute acquisition.
About 145
light-years in
diameter, M13 is composed of several hundred thousand
stars, the brightest of which is a
red giant, the
variable star V11, also known as V1554 Herculis, with an apparent visual magnitude of 11.95. M13 is 22,200–25,000 light-years away from
Earth, and the globular cluster is one of over one hundred that orbit the center of the Milky Way.Single stars in this globular cluster were first resolved in 1779. Compared to the stars in the neighborhood of the
Sun, the stars of the M13 population are more than a hundred times more densely packed. They are so close together that they sometimes collide and produce new stars. The newly formed, young stars, so-called "
blue stragglers", are particularly interesting to astronomers.The 1974
Arecibo message, which contained encoded information about the human race, DNA, atomic numbers, Earth's position and other information, was beamed from the
Arecibo Observatory radio telescope towards M13 as an experiment in contacting potential extraterrestrial civilizations in the cluster. The cluster will move through space during the transit time; opinions differ as to whether or not the cluster will be in a position to receive the message by the time that it arrives.
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