Category: globular

Glorious Globular

M3 

Summer is approaching, the nights have become grey. But I do not stop observing.
Here is an impression of M3. I had fun teasing out as much detail as possible.
Globulars are difficult to render. The mind might see patterns that aren’t there. I
tried to remain objective. Lots of faint stars were present in the outer region of
the halo. I noticed some dark lanes in the halo, and the core looked elongated too.
I hope you like the view.

Date : June 5, 2007
Time : 22.30UT
Scope : ETX 105/1470
Meade 25mm and 15mm SP
Power : x66 to x100
FOV: 35′
Filter : none
Seeing : 2.5/5
Transp. : 2/5
Nelm : 4.9
Sketch Orientation : N up, W right.
Digital sketch made with PhotoPaint, based on a raw pencil sketch.
Best Regards,
 
Rony De Laet

http://www.geocities.com/rodelaet, my personal website.

The Lost Treasure of Hercules

M92 

Messier 92: Globular Cluster 

And yet, another one of those Globs – don’t worry, there are plenty, 29
in the Messier Catalog alone, but I am slowly pulling through, one more
down on the list and counting. All in all, I’d say: again not bad, measured
up to the years of life it cost me to draw it. You sit there at the telescope,
frozen to the spot in a never-ending struggle to decide, whether you’ve
seen the detail or not, whether you should draw it or not, your hands are
getting cold, your neck is getting stiff and the cluster simply keeps refusing
to turn out the way you want it or see it. Well, the longest journey comes to
an end, so here it is: M 92! I like to call it The Lost Treasure of Hercules,
because it is a great view, yet often overlooked due to its proximity to the
far more well-known M 13. Maybe next time you visit the area, remember to
make a little stop-over at M 92.

Date: April 15, 2007
Location: Kegelhaus, Erbendorf, Bavaria, Germany
Instrument: Dobsonian 8″ f/6
Constellation: Hercules
Seeing: II of VI
Transparency: I-II of VI
NELM: 6m2
Magnification: 133x
Technique: white pastel pens and white ink-pen on black cardboard

Sebastian Lehner

Namibia Globular

NGC 6388 

Globular clusters display distinct “personalities” to an attentive observer. Some
appear as pale, starless discs in large aperture telescopes while others, like Omega
Centauri, begin to resolve in small refractors. Less frequently, they will display
subtle color. My sketch of NGC 6388 in Scorpius is an example of this. Using the
Sossusvlei Mountain Lodge 12″ Schmidt-Cassegrain with a 31mm Nagler (~100x), the
globular’s star-like core appeared to be weakly yellow. The tint disappeared at
higher magnification (250X/12mm Nagler).

The original drawing was done at the eyepiece using a soft lead pencil. I prepared a
copy based on this drawing and my field notes. First, a “smudge” of graphite was
dotted with acrylic ink. A garden variety Bic pen with blue ink formed the core —
and when color inverted — captured my visual impression of the yellow color fairly
closely. The nucleus was then enhanced with Photoshop and the entire drawing blurred
to simulate the rather poor resolution caused by the seeing conditions.

Dave Riddle
Smyrna, Georgia USA

Grand gathering of ancients

M5 

Although the light pollution from my residence severely limits deep sky observing;
I took advantage of unusually transparent seeing conditions to observe some bright
galaxies, globular clusters and planetary nebula. My favorite globular cluster
targets are M-5, M-92 and M-15. On this evening M-5 was well positioned for
observing just after dark. The appeal of M-5 for me is the bright glowing egg
shaped core with arching sprinkles of stars curving out from the center. As you
move out from the core the star density gradually drops off creating a very
pleasing view.

M-5 glows at magnitude 5.6 and is located about 20 minutes of arc north and west
from 5 Serpentis. This globular is approximately 13 billion years old at a
distance of 24,500 ly from us. The distance across this great ball of tens of
thousands of stars is about 165 ly.
  
  Sketch:
  Date and Time: 6-9-2007, 315-3:45 UT
  Scope: 18” f/5 Dobsonian. 12mm eyepiece 167X
  8”x12” white sketching paper, 4B soft charcoal pencil,
  blending stump, scanned and inverted
  Seeing: Pickering 8/10
  Transparency: Excellent 4/5
  Nelm: 4.8
  
  Frank McCabe
  Oak Forest, Il.

Globe of suns

M13 

7th May  2007. around 20:30UT
Novo Cice, Croatia

This sketch was created on plain A4 paper using graphite pencils and
fingers (for blurring). Later it was scanned and inverted in Photoshop
after some minor contrast and brightness adjustments.
I used 8″ F6 Dobson and 6mm Super Plossl Eyepiece. Magnification was
200x and field of view was 0.25°. Limiting magnitude was 5.50 and
transparency was very good.

M13 is beautiful globular cluster in Hercules. With an apparent
magnitude of 5.8, it is barely visible with the naked eye on a very
clear night. Its real diameter is about 145 light-years, and is composed
of several hundred thousand stars, the brightest of which has an
apparent magnitude of 11.95. M13 is 25,100 light-years away from Earth.

Vedran Vrhovac
www.inet.hr/~vevrhova/english/index.htm

Sphere of influence

M5 

7th May  2007. around 21:30UT
Novo Cice, Croatia

This sketch was created on plain A4 paper using graphite pencils and
fingers (for blurring). Later it was scanned and inverted in Photoshop
after some minor contrast and brightness adjustments.
I used 8″ F6 Dobson and 6mm Super Plossl Eyepiece. Magnification was
200x and field of view was 0.25°. Limiting magnitude was 5.50 and
transparency was very good.

M5 is beautiful globular cluster in Serpens. M5 was discovered by the
German astronomer Gottfried Kirch in 1702 when he was observing a comet.
Charles Messier found it in 1764 and thought it a nebula without any
stars associated with it. William Herschel resolved individual stars in
the cluster in 1791, counting roughly 200 of them.Spanning 165
light-years across, M5 is one of the larger globular clusters known. The
gravitational sphere of influence of M5, (ie. the volume of space where
stars would be gravitationally bound to the cluster and not ripped away
from it by the Milky Way’s gravitational pull), has a radius of some 200
light-years.

At 13 billion years old it is also one of the older globulars associated
with the Milky Way Galaxy. The distance of M5 is about 24,500
light-years away from Earth and the cluster contains more than 100,000
stars up to perhaps 500,000 according to some estimates.

Vedran Vrhovac
www.inet.hr/~vevrhova/english/index.htm

Waiting for a return call

M13 
Messier 13 Globular Cluster

At the darkest part of a June night, you may spot a faint fuzzy patch way up high in
the south. Through binoculars, it appears as a gently glowing ball of light. With a
telescope, you can glimpse its true nature: a cluster of almost a million stars,
swarming together in space.

This wonderful object is known as M 13, because it was the thirteenth entry in the
catalogue of fuzzy objects recorded by the eighteenth-century French astronomer
Charles Messier. We now classify M 13 as a globular cluster. These great round balls of stars are among the oldest objects in our Galaxy, dating back to its birth some 13 billion years ago.

In 1974, radio astronomers sent a message towards M 13, hoping to inform the
inhabitants of any planet there of our existence.  There’s only one problem: M 13 lies so far away that we won’t receive a reply until AD 52,000!!!!!!!!!!!

Sketch was made large on A4 black cartridge paper using white and colored pastels,
while viewing an astrophotograph…the sketch was then scanned and processed in Photoshop CS.

Peter Desypris
Athens, Greece

Two thirds the age of the universe

M3 Globular cluster 

Drawing Globulars has always been a nerve-wrecking experience to me, so
many stars, all just lighting up for the split of a second in the corner
of your eye, what do you draw, what can you leave out, what the heck do
you really see?

The more delighting it is, when you suddenly realize, not only you
slowly get the hang of it, but the results are actually not even bad,
maybe even some of the better drawings in your whole catalog.
That’s exactly what happened with M 3, creating it was a pain, but the
result is highly presentable – at least that’s what I think!

The most fascinating thing about Globular Clusters is their age, they are
ancient, they’ve seen aeons on their way around the galactic center,
they’ve inhabitated this Galaxy ages before any human being has ever set
foot on this Earth, ages before Earth even existed. Reason enough to
catch a fleeting glimpse of those objects – measured by our lifespan,
not by theirs, they’re gonna be around long after the human race has
vanished again into the void.

Sebastian Lehner

Date: April 09, 2007
Location: Kegelhaus, Erbendorf, Bavaria, Germany
Instrument: Dobsonian 8″ f/6
Constellation: Canes venatici
Seeing: II of VI
Transparency: III of VI
NELM: 5m5
Magnificaton: 133x