Incredibly nice images Richard. NGC4490 is sure interesting. And thanks
for the glob lesson. I had always wondered why M13 looked like a pile of
little blue marbles. Now I know.
Jane of the Valley
At 02:35 AM 4/21/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>Friday night I did a bit of imaging from my backyard in Castro Valley.
Among the targets that night were NGC4490 and M53.
>
>I don't think I have seen M53 too many times. One thing I noticed was a
large number of blue stars in it.
>
>I had recently read in the book "The Big Bang" by Joseph Silk of Oxford
that Globs contain a lot of old blue stars. Old blue stars: I always had
thought blue stars were young hot stars.
>
>Well as it turns out, when a star depletes its hydrogen fuel, it can
resort to fusing Helium and if it does, the stars get a lot hotter and look
blue.
>
>Instead of the Blue Straggler theory I had heard before, it appears that
the blue stars are just helium burning stars. That makes sense when you
consider that Globular Clusters are some of the oldest objects in the
universe. It did not make sense to me that ancient globs would have young
hot blue stars in them.
>
>Here is a link to my M53 image:
>
>http://www.rdcrisp.darkhorizons.org/m53_globular_cluster_page.htm
>
>and NGC4490:
>
>http://www.rdcrisp.darkhorizons.org/ngc4490_rgb_page.htm
>
>Both of these were taken with my newly refurbished C14. I had been
fighting mirror flop with it for some time and finally applied a lot of
grease to the central focus tube and that seemed to greatly improve the
situation. It is not 100% gone, but it is usable now where it was really
not before.
>rdc
>
>
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