M14: A Golden Ball of Stars
This morning, my cat woke me up at 3 AM, and I noticed it was clear outside. But, the sun would start rising in just a couple of hours, so doing some super-long-exposure shot of a faint nebula wasn’t in the cards. However, globular clusters don’t take long to image, as they are relatively bright objects. I checked which one was highest in the sky, and M14 it was!
It lacks the colorfulness of some other globular clusters, but there’s still something uniquely gorgeous of a golden ball of 150,000 stars that’s 13 billion years old. This one lies about 30,300 light years away from Earth, and is considered one of the dimmer and less dense globular clusters surrounding the Milky Way.
