Diving Deep into M92: An Ancient Stellar City! ✨

M92

Super excited to share my latest image, a sparkling portrait of M92! This one is a real gem, nestled in the constellation Hercules. While its famous neighbor, M13, often steals the spotlight, M92 is truly a sight to behold and has some incredible characteristics that make it super interesting.

First off, let's talk about clusters. M92 is a globular cluster, which means it's a massive, tightly bound spherical collection of stars, all held together by their mutual gravity. Think of it like a giant, cosmic swarm of hundreds of thousands of stars, all packed relatively close together! Our Milky Way galaxy is home to over 150 such globular clusters, typically found in the halo surrounding our galactic disk.

M92 itself is pretty vast. It spans about 108 light-years across in true diameter, and it's absolutely teeming with stars – roughly 330,000 of them! To give you a sense of scale, if you were on a planet in the middle of M92, your night sky would be absolutely ablaze with thousands of stars, appearing far brighter than anything we see from Earth. 🤩

And talk about ancient! M92 is one of the oldest known globular clusters in our Milky Way, with an estimated age of around 13.8 billion years. That's almost as old as the Universe itself! 🤯 Studying clusters like M92 helps astronomers understand the early universe and how stars evolve, as all the stars within a globular cluster largely formed at the same time from the same material.

It's also quite distant, sitting approximately 26,700 light-years away from us. Despite that immense distance, it's bright enough to be visible to the naked eye under very dark skies!

Capturing M92's brilliance was a real treat, revealing the individual stars in its incredibly dense core. Hope you enjoy this peek into one of our galaxy's most ancient and densely packed stellar cities!

Integration time - 18 mn
6 x 180s - 18 mn

Setup:
TS-Optics SD-APO 102mm f/7
ZWO ASI533MC Pro
Sky-watcher EQ6-R Pro
IDAS LP-D2
Askar M54 OAG
ZWO ASIAIR Pro
ZWO EAF
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