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I was looking at this object last month from Katoomba and I could not resolve it into even a slight granular field in my 12". Astrojason was looking with me. We even went to Alex's 17.5" and could not resolve it into a granular object.
It was a very windy night though. Perhaps the seeing was bad. I didn't really get past 182x that night.
According to sky safari m54 may not even be part of the milky way and is actually part of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy. Current estimates is that it's 87000 light years away. Calculations indicate it is 300 light years across. That makes it second largest and brightest glob we can see, second only to omega centuri when looking at absolute magnitude. With the distances involved with this object we need much larger instruments to resolve m54 well.
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