Explore the Universe - M4

As it is approaching late Spring, Scorpius is starting to poke its claws above the southern horizon earlier in the evening.  This is quite exciting as it soon heralds the appearance of the heart of the Milky Way in Sagittarius with all its beauty.  However, this post will focus on Messier 4, a globular cluster sitting right next to Antares.  Antares is the bright heart of Scorpius named after the Greek meaning 'Equal to Ares'.  Ares was the Greek god of war whose Roman equivalent is Mars.  This is noteworthy as Antares and Mars look similar to each other in the sky as bright red objects.  Last year in fact Mars and Antares were less than 5° from each other in April of 2016.  It was an amazing sight.

Lying a little more than 1.25° to the West of Antares is Messier 4.  A typical wider field eyepiece in a moderate sized telescope will be able to locate both within the same field of view.  This is how I found it at 1:30am with a tired mind and sleepy eyes.  I did not have the chance to photograph it as I had already put my imaging scope away for the evening.  It looked like a typical globular cluster as a round, dense formation of stars.  It went across about a third of my 25mm eyepiece with a 62.5' field of view.  Some individual stars were observable around the edge of the blurry object.  It turns out that it was the first globular cluster where individual stars were resolved.  As Scorpius rises higher in the sky I hope to have a better look at it earlier in the evening.  My observation record for M4 is shown below.

Observation Record - M4

After a Winter and Spring of observing open clusters it is quite a gear shift moving onto the Summer globulars.  It is more difficult to see individual stars in a globular as they are further away and orders of magnitude more dense.

Last night was an open house at the Rothney Astrophysical Observatory.  It was very cloudy on the way there but it cleared around 9pm.  One of the members found Jupiter manually nearly an hour before the sun set.  We viewed the 7% waxing crescent Moon, the Hercules Cluster M13 and I was even able to stick the International Space Station into my view and manually tracked it for a few seconds.  The solar panel array can be easily seen.  Jupiter had its Great Red Spot facing directly toward us at 10pm and it provided a great sight for many first-time Jupiter viewers.  There was a hydrogen alpha solar telescope available to use and prominences on the Sun were visible.  Sunspot region 2659 was clearly visible in scopes equipped with a solar filter.

Sunset at the RAO

Later in the evening, after 11pm and throughout the night, the aurora put on an amazing show.  Unfortunately I had already packed it in and was cruising home to bed.  A moderate G2 geomagnetic storm decided to dazzle everyone with a beautiful display of the Northern Lights.