Friday 15 January 2010

Lonely ball of stars

Having had that adventurous astronomical thought "where will I explore next?" I recalled a guest speaker mentioning the Intergalactic Wanderer. It is a lonely globular cluster, NGC 2419 in Lynx. It can be found by going a little way north of the star Castor, and it is just 10.4 magnitude and 6.2 arcminutes across, because it is more than a quarter of a million light years away in deep space. That means it is many times further away than any of those stars in the photo. The view of our galaxy from within the cluster would be pretty stunning but not like you'd imagine from sci-fi films. It would be something like our view of Andromeda but 10 times larger. This picture comes to you via the stacking and processing of 15 x 10 second exposures on the 20-inch at ISO 1600 and f/3.

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