Astr111 Photography Projects, Fall 2005

M14, Kristina Spontarelli

Globular clusters are a gravitationally bound concentration of a massive amount of stars. There are approximately ten thousand to one million stars concentrated in a globular cluster. Globular clusters are also believed to be very old and formed from an earlier generation of stars due to the fact that they are much lower in heavy element abundance than other stars such as the Sun. Due to their age, the stars hold a much more red coloring and therefore a lower temperature. This particular globular cluster, M14, was one of the original discoveries of Charles Messier who documented it on June 1, 1764. Because of his weaker telescope, Messier saw it as a diffusion of stars and was unable to distinguish individual stars. However with a stronger telescope, in 1783, William Herschel was able to distinguished it into individual stars. And now looking at the present object, we can observe a large quantity of visible stars. Messier Object 14 can be found in the Constellation Ophiuchus.

M14 has a slight elliptical shape to it, and contains a large number of variable stars, said to be approximately 70. The linear size of M14 is 44 light years. Because of its distance it appears much dimmer than other messier objects, but on the contrary the luminosity is about 400,000 times that of the Sun. What a magnificent example of the glory of our Awesome God!

References:
http://www.seasky.org/astronomy/astronomy_messier_11to20.html

http://www.seds.org/messier/m/m014.html

http://www.seds.org/messier/cluster.html