The good folks at the Space Telescope Science Institute European Space Agency just released this gorgeous Hubble picture of the globular cluster NGC 1806:
Wow! I actually cropped it a bit and shrank it to get it to fit correctly on the blog, so click it to see it in all its 3741 x 2303 pixel glory. Globular clusters are spherical collections of hundreds of thousands and even sometimes millions of stars, held together by their mutual gravity. The stars orbit every which-way, and I like to think of them as stellar beehives. The clusters as a whole orbit galaxies on long paths that sometimes take them well away from their parent galaxy, so we see them scattered across the sky. NGC 1806 is actually part of another galaxy: the Large Magellanic Cloud (or LMC to those in the know), an irregular smear of a billion or so stars that ...
