When I was younger, it was pretty common on clear nights to see me at the end of my driveway with my telescope. And one of my favorite targets to observe was (and still are) globular clusters: hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of stars all bound together in a tight ball due to their gravity. And one of the best of those is the fabulous M15... and when it's seen by Hubble, well, it's simply spectacular:
Holy wow! Click to englobulenate - I had to shrink the image a lot to get it to fit here, so as gorgeous as this is it's a shadow of the higher-res version... or the ginormous full-res one! M15 is relatively nearby as globulars go, about 35,000 light years. Over 150 of these objects orbit our galaxy, and so some are quite far away. Not only is it close, but M15 is also ...
