The big white blob in the middle of this picture is M13, the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules.
Taken with a cheap 6″ reflector and a £50 second hand camera in my back garden in Southend. You can see a higher resolution version of this picture here.
https://mega.nz/file/wwpmRbbS#iJMEeLpCsNDtcGW-uCcVrynj60IQYUS4z3tQ-floaL8
I like the contrast with the orange star to the left (HIP 81848, 1400 ly, slightly cooler than our sun) and the blue star to the bottom right (HIP 81673, 372 ly, considerably hotter than our sun). I hope you can also see, in the top left hand corner, a slightly elongated smudge. This light is from long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away. 64 million light years away to be precise. The light captured in this image left galaxy NGC 6207 only a few million years after the dinosaurs departed this earth.
If I’d ever studied astronomy seriously then globular clusters would have been No. 1 on my list of things I’d want to specialise in. I find them fascinating. All large galaxies, including ours, have a halo of hundreds of globular clusters, consisting of hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of densely packed stars. This one is 20,000 light years away and consists of somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 stars. At the centre, stars are a hundred times more densely packed than in the neighbourhood of the sun. The view inside would show a night sky ablaze with bright stars.
Globular clusters are truly ancient. Some contain stars that are nearly as old as the universe itself. Yet their history and role in galaxy formation is still not agreed. Whether they formed before galaxies, whether they were the cores of proto-galaxies, whether they were captured by the galaxies they now orbit, these questions remain largely unresolved. This particular cluster orbits in the opposite direction to the galaxy itself, suggesting that it is not a native of our galactic neighbourhood.
To find it in the night sky, you can use the Plough to find the two bright stars Arcturus and Vega. M13 is roughly two thirds of the way between the two, shown as the yellow dot in Hercules. This time of year it’s about half way up the SE sky early in the morning.
For a rather more impressive picture of the same scene, here is a gorgeous version by Joan Josep Isach Cogollos:
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap220804.html
And here’s how Hubble sees it.
Platitude of the Day 