I was waiting for the comet Garradd C/2009 P1 to rise behind my house, and the night hadn’t cast its darkness on my site yet. Well, by darkness I mean light pollution, but make what you want of it. Anyway, with the sky still blue I shot twenty images, three minutes each, to the most prominent globular cluster visible at my latitude.
The blob you see in the top left is nothing but three hundred thousands stars condensed in a mere 145 light years diameter.
Noticeably, the Arceibo message was directed to this cluster in 1974. I guess we won’t hear back for a while, given the estimated distance of twenty-five thousands light-years!
On the bottom-right of the image you can see the faint spiral galaxy NGC6207, in which a supernova was discovered in 2004. It’s forty-five million light-years away.