“When someone demands blind obedience, you’d be a fool not to peek.” -Jim Fiebig
But sometimes, it's the wonders of the Universe that peek out at us from behind the intervening gas and dust that would block the light from them otherwise.
Image credit: © Copyright 1970 — 2014 by Fred Espenak, via http://astropixels.com/globularclusters/M9-01.html.
This week's deep-sky object for Messier Monday -- Messier 9 -- has the distinction of being one of the closest globulars to the galactic center, yet its stars are incredibly old and metal-poor. Oh, and it's been spectacularly imaged by Hubble, revealing far more stars than were anticipated to be there!
Image credit: NASA & ESA, via http://spacetelescope.org/images/heic1205a/.
Go read the whole remarkable story of this object and our discovery of its wonders!
- Log in to post comments
More like this
"[T]he entire globe will soon be wrapped in a glowing envelope through which none of the magic of the Universe can be seen by the naked eye." -George Eslinger
Welcome to still another Messier Monday here on Starts With A Bang! Each Monday, we highlight a different one of the 110 deep-sky objects…
"Every star may be a sun to someone." -Carl Sagan
Welcome back to yet another Messier Monday! Each week, we highlight one of the 110 deep-sky objects that make up the Messier catalogue: Charles Messier's legacy to comet-hunters and amateur astronomers, pointing out some of the most easily visible…
"How is it they live for eons in such harmony - the billions of stars - when most men can barely go a minute without declaring war in their mind against someone they know?" -Thomas Aquinas
Welcome back to another Messier Monday here on Starts With a Bang! Each Monday, we take an in-depth look at…
"I would rather have one article a day of this sort; and these ten or twenty lines might readily represent a whole day's hard work in the way of concentrated, intense thinking and revision, polish of style, weighing of words." -Joseph Pulitzer
When it comes to the Messier objects, though, it isn't …