Globular Clusters

Globular clusters are roughly spherical aggregations of stars totalling up to about one million times the mass of our sun. Over one hundred such clusters are known to be in orbit around our galaxy. The globular clusters shown here are bright and well-studied examples. With so many stars in a small area of the sky, globular clusters are useful in establishing the image scale and rotation, so we generally an image of one of these each time we use Omega-Prime.

The images shown here were obtained by D. Thompson and R. Fockenbrock in August 1996. All three images are composites of 10 separate exposures, where the telescope is moved slightly between successive exposures. This allows for removal of known bad pixels, producing the clean images shown here. All three images are the same size - 6.75 arcminutes square, which is the full field of view of the Omega-Prime camera.

Click on any of the images below to see a larger picture.

M2

M15

M92

[M2] [M2] [M2]
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