Messier 13 (NGC 6205), the Great Hercules Cluster, is the brightest globular cluster visible from the northern hemisphere, located in the constellation Hercules.
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Messier 13 (NGC 6205), the Great Hercules Cluster, is the brightest globular cluster visible from the northern hemisphere, located in the constellation Hercules. Distance estimates commonly range from about 22,000 to 25,000 light-years, and the cluster spans roughly 145 light-years, containing several hundred thousand stars, many of them among the oldest in the Milky Way at 11-12 billion years of age. Under sufficiently dark skies it is faintly visible to the naked eye as a hazy patch. M13 is a rewarding target for revealing a dense, resolved core of individual stars, requiring good seeing and sufficient focal length/resolution to avoid the core stars blending into an unresolved blob, with the cluster's characteristic “propeller” dust lanes sometimes visible in deep images.
[Source: Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_13]
Annotated Image
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Sky Location
The chart above shows where this image sits on the night sky. The yellow outline is its field of view, with the picture itself drawn at its true orientation; north is up and east is left. Click the chart to zoom in, and use "open full resolution" for the full-size chart.
Image Details
| Moon Phase: | New Moon |
|---|---|
| Camera: | Seestar S30 Pro (4K Sony IMX585 sensor) |
| Optics: | 160 mm focal length, f/5.3, 30 mm aperture (APO quadruplet) |
| Filter: | IRCUT |
| Binning: | 1x1 |
| Date: | 2026-05-18 |
| Number of images: | 9 |
| Exposure per image: | 60 s |
| Total imaging time: | 9 min |
PixInsight Processing
- Image Integration (x2)
- Drizzle Integration
- BlurXTerminator (AI deconvolution)
- Spectrophotometric Color Calibration
- NoiseXTerminator (AI denoise)
- Multiscale Adaptive Stretch