This Messier globular star cluster is located 60,000 light years away in the constellation of Coma Berenices at a declination of +18 degrees. It is a magnitude 7.8 cluster which spans 13 arc-minutes in our apparent view. This corresponds to a diameter of 230 light years, which makes it the largest Messier globular cluster.
This bright and dense globular cluster contains over 250,000 stars and is one of the furthest star clusters from the center of our galaxy. Although the core glows white, the stars surrounding the core are both younger bluish stars and older reddish stars, evidence of both relatively recent star formation and a significant population of red giant stars.
Famed astronomer William Herschel, the first astronomer to resolve this globular cluster into individual stars, wrote the following description for this object many years ago - "A cluster of very close stars; one of the most beautiful objects I remember to have seen in the heavens. The cluster appears under the form of a solid ball, consisting of small stars, quite compressed into one blaze of light, with a great number of loose ones surrounding it, and distinctly visible in the general mass."
The small face-on galaxy seen below, and just slightly right of, M53 is located 1.8 billion light years away.
If you would like to see more of this type of object, my Astrobin Messier Collection is
here and my Astrobin globular cluster collection is
here. This image is part of my effort to update and improve the images in my Messier Catalog, which were first imaged 7 years ago.
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