Messier 13 - The Great Star Cluster in Hercules

I love the range of color in this distant star cluster! The Great Star Cluster in the constellation Hercules is a globular cluster containing hundreds of thousands of stars. It contains some of the oldest stars around. There are many of these kinds of star clusters around our Milky Way galaxy, some bigger than others. This particular cluster is approximately 150 light years across, and is about 22,000 light years from our Earth.

In the top right of the image, you can see a distant galaxy as well! It’s about 37 million light years distant. But that isn’t the farthest object in this image. That honor belongs to the faint smudge of light just to the right of the denser part of the cluster. That is IC 4617, a spiral galaxy at nearly 490 MILLION light years away!