Also known as M13 from Messier's list of objects which are not comets. It is a cloud of hundreds of thousands of stars held together more or less by their own mutual gravity, located around 22,000 light years away from the Solar System.

I took this picture myself years ago, on a very wobbly 5" cassegrain telescope. Craigslist special. :comfy-cool:

Look up a star party near you. There are nerds with very nice telescopes and if you're willing to camp for a few nights you can hover around them and look through that shit. There's a guy at the one I've been going to who drags his 600 pound custom built 24" (aperture!) dobsonian telescope out every year. You need to climb a ladder just to look through the eyepiece, but the naked eye views are absolutely glorious.

    • Nakoichi [they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I really can't wait till we can start getting images back from the James Webb telescope. Imagine 4 decades of advancement since the Hubble.

      • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        This shit was supposed to be launched years ago and I'm very mad. The mission profile is so cool. This shit is supposed to basically sit at the L2 Legrange Point, permanently in the Earth's shadow, yet in stable "orbit" around the Earth and the Sun's combined center of gravity. IIRC the camera sensor is supposed to operate only a few degrees above absolute zero too.