The great globular cluster in Hercules was the first Messier object I ever found. Back in 2016 I first acquainted myself with the Hercules constellation and the keystone that forms the heart of it. I knew Messier 13 was on one side of the keystone between two bright stars. It took me nearly an hour to find it for the first time. In my eyepiece it looked like a water molecule with the cluster forming the oxygen atom and two stars equally spaced away forming the hydrogen.
In Spring, Hercules is just coming back up to reside overhead for the next few months and it will give plenty of opportunity to go back to one of my old favourites. With my red dot finder and knowledge today it only takes a few seconds to find. This cluster serves as a milestone marker where once it took an hour now takes a matter of seconds. The image below is the shot I took in May 2017. I am hoping to learn how to use dark frames to get rid of noise from the photographs in the future.
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| Messier 13 |
In a dark sky it is barely visible to the naked eye and spans a diameter about two-thirds of the Moon. The globular cluster contains more than a quarter millions stars packed into a region nearly 150 light years across. The cluster lies more than 25,000 light years away from Earth. It spanned approximately one-third of the way across my eyepiece and was circular in shape. The record below shows my observation.
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| M13 Observation Record |
This was the second of the three globular clusters I observed on May 21, 2017 and definitely the best. I was planning on going to bed after this observation around midnight but stayed up another hour and a half to catch Messier 4.
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