M3, in the constellation of Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dogs), was first described by Charles Messier in 1764 and first resolved into stars by William Herschel in 1784. It is a dense cluster of 500 million stars in a cluster 180 light-years (ly) in diameter, but with half its mass within 11 ly of its centre. It is part of the Milky Way's galactic halo and orbits the galaxy in an eliptical orbit ranging from 22,000 ly to 66,000 ly from the galactic centre. Currently it is 33,900 ly from us and 33,000 ly above the plane of the galaxy.
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M3 captured with my LX200 fitted with a0.33 focal reducer (focal length 800 mm). The diameter of the cluster is about 18 minutes of arc. The brightest stars are about magnitude 12.7 although the cluster as a whole has a magnitude of 6.4 putting it on the verge of naked-eye visibility in a totaly dark sky. Date and Time: 27th March 2007 00:25 UT Camera: Atik 1HS Telescope: LX200 with 0.33 focal reducer Capture: K3CCDTools. Low gamma, exposure 20 sec, 62% gain Processing: K3CCDTools. 12 frames stacked. Registax wavelets 1 =10, 2 = 5 |
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