Quote:
Originally Posted by erick
OK, devil's advocate here. What if someone says: "Globs, seen a couple, you've seen 'em all!"
Why search for lots of globular clusters? Don't they all look much the same?
|
Your talkin' to the aperture-challenged here Eric
! But even in my scope, they're not the same - some centrally brightened, some even, some round, some blobby, some spread out, some tight. Firstly, it's what they are that fascinates me - sometimes hundreds of thousands to millions of stars in a ball, orbiting galaxies. What the..!! Using one's imagination to visualise them if they were closer, their paths through the starfields... Of course there's OC & 47Tuc - breathtaking - in our southern skies to guide the imagination!
Then it's the challenge of looking for them and the exhilaration of finding them in a small scope. There's also the history - Messier eliminating them from his comet hunts, OC not a star after all, etc. If you remember McNaught through my scope at Snake Valley - looked exactly like a dim, centrally-brightened globular.
As far as resolving them goes, I can only get the barest minimum of resolution on just the handful of biggest & brightest. Good thing I don't have bigger aperture - couldn't stand the excitement
!
Yeah, I know... gotta get a life!!
Cheers -