Globular clusters are some of the most stunning objects in the sky. Composed of hundreds of thousands of stars, over 150 of these compact beehives orbit our Milky Way galaxy alone. Some are close enough that even through a small telescope they reveal a breathtaking beauty, individual stars sparsely distributed in their outskirts becoming more cramped and crowded until they blur into a generalized smear in the middle. When you use a bigger telescope to look at them, you get wondrous beauty:
[Click to massively apiaryenate, and you really, really want to.] This picture is from Adam Block, using the 0.8 meter Schulman Telescope on Mt. Lemmon in Arizona, and shows M5, one of my all-time favorite globulars (I posted a Hubble image of this cluster a while back, too). It's located in the constellation of Serpens, visible over the entire populated region of Earth at this time of year. ...
