Thursday, Jun 20, 2024

Messier 10 or M10 is a ball of stars that lies about 15,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus. About 80 light-years across, it should appear about two-thirds the size of the Moon in the night sky. However, its outer regions are extremely diffuse, and even the comparatively bright core is too faint to see with the naked eye. Messier 10 is notable for its high population of blue stragglers, stars that appear to be much younger than their neighbors. Stars in globular clusters are thought to have formed and aged together, so they must all be about the same age. These anomalous, bluer stars were created by collisions between stars or other stellar interactions. Such events are easy to imagine in densely populated globular clusters, in which up to a few million stars are tightly clustered. This image is composed of observations made in visible light using an 8" Ritchey Chrétien telescope and ASI294MC Pro camera with an L-Quad Optolong filter on a CEM25P mount in the backyard. There were 225 best frames of 380, of 60 seconds each.