The great globular cluster (of stars) in the constellation Hercules, a.k.a. Messier 13, is high in the night sky right now. If you have good eyes, said Edmond Halley in 1714, “it shows itself to the naked eye when the sky is serene and the Moon absent.” It is 25,100 light years away and has become a popular beginner’s telescope target. It is made up of something like a million stars, and its age is said to be 24 billion years, which means it started shining just after the Big Bang. And now we can finally see it. Ain’t that grand?

I rented a medium-grade 10″ telescope from My Telescope and spent an hour the early morning of May 25 sucking photons onto a CCD chip and downloading the results. After struggling to process the image files, I finally ended up with (click to expand):

Since I am discovering that image processing is as much black art as science, and that I wasn’t born an artist (no snickers, please), I shelled out a few extra bucks to find out what a pro would do with M13. I checked in at another telescope rental site, LightBuckets, and rented a research-grade observatory with a 24″ telescope rigged up with the latest astrophotography gadgets. I created an “imaging plan” for M13 and stepped back to see what the pros would do with it. Here is their image:

Gasp! I will probably never make it to this level, but maybe there is some hope for something in between.

I decided to try the high priced spread once more for a color image of the Black Eye Galaxy, which I will duly post one of these days.

Dave, with spots in front of his eyes.