When you see this globular cluster through a telescioe you'll likely only see a fuzzy ball 8-9 arcminutes wide because the bright center is only 35m light years across. But when imaged it is shown to be more like 19-20 arcminutes across - i.e. two-thirds the diameter of the moon. So pretty big!
I worked hard not to blow out the center so that we can see the sheer size of M10 without losing too much color due to being overly bright.
Wikipedia: Messier 10 or
M10 (also designated
NGC 6254) is a
globular cluster of stars in the
equatorialconstellation of
Ophiuchus. The object was discovered by the French astronomer
Charles Messier on May 29, 1764, who cataloged it as number 10 in
his catalogue and described it as a "
nebula without stars". In 1774, German astronomer
Johann Elert Bode likewise called it a "nebulous patch without stars; very pale". Using larger instrumentation, German-born astronomer
William Herschel was able to resolve the cluster into its individual members. He described it as a "beautiful cluster of extremely compressed stars".
William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse thought he could distinguish a dark lane through part of the cluster. The first to estimate the distance to the cluster was
Harlow Shapley, although his derivation of 33,000 light years was much further than the modern value of 15,000 light years.
The cluster is currently located about 5 kiloparsecs (16 kly) from the
Galactic Center.
[12] It completes an orbit around the
Milky Way galaxy about every 140 million years, during which it crosses the
plane of the galactic disk every 53 million years.
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