MILKY WAY GLOBULAR CLUSTERS
... seen one, seen 'em
all! Well, some might say that but I disagree.
When you observe more than just the few big bright ones, you discover
that every globular cluster has its own quirks.
In 2009, I set myself a challenge to image all the Milky Way globular
clusters possible from my home located at latitude 32 degrees South, in
country NSW, Australia. The majority of the clusters were accessible
with the exception of a few that were too far north and several that are
highly reddened by intervening interstellar dust and are only visible
with specialised infrared detectors. My imaging device, the GSTAR-EX CCD
Deep-Sky Video Camera, is sensitive well beyond the normal visible light
range (400-700 nm) out to 1.1 micron (1100 nanometres), so a lot of the
moderately reddened clusters would still be within its grasp. I had
already imaged many globulars in my general imaging sessions, so the
list was completed fairly soon after on 12th April 2010.
In the initial list I left off two targets because I could not image
them from my observatory but in mid 2012, I set up an 8" f/6 reflector
in a paddock which allowed me to image very low to the north to a
declination of +50. This brought NGC 6229 and Messier 92 within range.
After imaging these two, it only left one on the list that was too far
north... Palomar 1 at declination +79.
More clusters are being discovered but all are being found with IR
detectors and so will be out of reach of my imaging system.
The list I followed contains 157
Milky Way globular clusters known at the time of writing.
http://spider.seds.org/spider/MWGC/mwgc.html#harris
The table containing all the data is rather large and would not present well on a mobile phone or small screen device, so just a few examples of my favorite globulars are accessible on this page below.
For those viewing from a PC here is the full data table with a link to selected object pages.
July 2025. To save some web
space, I have put most of the images into a single mosaic below. Any
special globulars still have a special page linked from the data list.
Some of the nice ones.
The rest... 130 Globular
Clusters.
