Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Hercules (Her)  ·  Contains:  HD150679  ·  HD150998  ·  Hercules Globular Cluster  ·  IC 4617  ·  M 13  ·  NGC 6205  ·  NGC 6207  ·  PGC 2074909  ·  PGC 2075117  ·  PGC 2076112  ·  PGC 2076581  ·  PGC 2076984  ·  PGC 2078154  ·  PGC 2078465  ·  PGC 2078732  ·  PGC 2082301  ·  PGC 2082302  ·  PGC 2082344  ·  PGC 2082966  ·  PGC 2085377  ·  PGC 2088062
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M13 Hercules Globular Cluster, Mau_Bard
M13 Hercules Globular Cluster, Mau_Bard

M13 Hercules Globular Cluster

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
M13 Hercules Globular Cluster, Mau_Bard
M13 Hercules Globular Cluster, Mau_Bard

M13 Hercules Globular Cluster

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Description

A night with nearly clear sky and 3/4 of full moon, leaves little degree of freedom in target's choice, and M13 was luckily one of the few available options on the night of 3 May 2023.
Globular clusters are not so easy to process if you want to preserve the core fine grain and enhance colors in a balanced way. Regarding colors, I followed here the good advice of my friend @Elmiko, who recommended me to apply, after linear processing, a mini-stretch with Arcsinh process in PI, in order to push the color intensity up, without exaggerating. I think was a good one, thanks Mike!
Other two galaxies are visible here, and I have learnt on this image the notion of "blue straggler"

M13 (NGC 6205)
M13 is one of the visualy biggest Globular Clusters, behind the great southern globulars Omega Centauri and 47 Tucanae, with M22 in Sagittarius providing very stiff competition.
M13 was discovered by Edmond Halley in 1714 and Messier added it to his list of nebulous objects in 1764.
It has an eccentric, 500 million year orbit around the galactic center and it can be as remote as 80,000 light years from us but at present it lies much closer at 26,000 light years. It is positioned 13 kly above the galactic plane.
M13 is one of the larger clusters with a physical diameter of 160 light years, with an apparent diameter on the celestial sphere of 21 arc-minutes. Astronomers believe M13 contains no more than one million stars with a total mass of 600,000 solar masses.
Its estimated age is 12 billion years.

Blue Stragglers
Single stars in M13 were first resolved in 1779 by William Herschel. Compared to the stars in the neighborhood of the Sun, the stars of the M13 population are more than a hundred times more densely packed. They are so close together that they sometimes collide and produce new stars. The newly formed, young stars, known as "blue stragglers", are particularly interesting to astronomers.

NGC 6207
NGC 6207 is a spiral galaxy located 30 Mly away in the constellation Hercules. It is designated as SA(s)c in the galaxy morphological classification scheme and was discovered by William Herschel in 1787.

IC 4617
IC 4617 is a Sbc spiral galaxy with active core, located some 500 Mly away, with a diameter of 175 kly, nearly the double of our Milky Way.

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Picture: Sketch of Hertzsprung–Russell diagram of a globular cluster, showing blue stragglers position. (From Wikipedia. Author: RicHard-59)

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