| Description | A lovely, colorful, relatively dim globular cluster discovered by [who else?] William Herschel on May 17, 1784. It contains something like 97 "blue straggler" stars. I'd never heard of one, but these are blue stars substantially brighter than "main sequence" stars. No one really knows how they are formed, though the leading theory -- because they mostly show up in clusters -- is that they're the result of forced mergers by neighboring stars stimulated by the tight confines of a Globular Cluster. The combined stars end up bigger and bluer than would normally form by themselves. In any event the colors in this cluster are particularly pretty. Caught on a night when I wasn't expecting anything other than clouds... looked outside when getting ready to go to bed and was shocked to see stars. |
