Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Boötes (Boo)  ·  Contains:  NGC 5466
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NGC 5466, George Simon
NGC 5466
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NGC 5466

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NGC 5466, George Simon
NGC 5466
Powered byPixInsight

NGC 5466

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Description

After having spent the last couple of months returning to showpiece targets that I have not imaged for years, I resumed during the current new-Moon period my typical practice of shooting more obscure, less-frequently imaged objects. In particular, I shot for the first time the globular cluster NGC 5466.

NGC 5466 lies about 52,000 light years away. While it does not come close to making the visual impression that its splashier cousins, like Omega Centauri, 47 Tucanae or M13, make, it does have some distinctive characteristics of its own. It belongs to class XII of the Shapley-Sawyer Concentration classification system, the class of globular clusters with the lowest concentration of stars at their centers. NGC 5466 also has an unusually large population of blue horizontal branch stars. These are stars that, after evolving off the Main Sequence to become red giants, begin to burn helium in their cores. This process raises the stars' temperature, with the result that they turn blue. The presence of blue horizontal branch stars in NGC 5466, along with the usual smattering of blue stragglers that always pepper globular clusters, lends this cluster more of a bluish appearance than is typically seen in globs.

The field surrounding NGC 5466 in my image is marked by the presence of a large number of distant galaxies. I have uploaded a version B of the image, in which I have annotated some of the more prominent of these galaxies, including their distances from us (mlyr=million light years; blyr=billion light years).

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  • Final
    NGC 5466, George Simon
    Original
  • NGC 5466, George Simon
    B

B

Title: Annotated Version

Description: Mlyr=million light years.
Blyr=billion light years.

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NGC 5466, George Simon

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Cloudy Nights