Looks something like this:
That picture was taken on the Case 9.5 inch telescope on top of A.W. Smith, connected to a Nikon D40 camera. The cluster has a magnitude of 5.8, so it would be a naked-eye object if we were not in the middle of Cleveland. But we are, so we have to use a telescope and a thirty-second exposure to get a decent shot of it. That’s the longest exposure the camera can handle, as the noise becomes more and more significant. I could combine several images together to get one nice shot, but that is rather obnoxious to do with consumer cameras (The bayer filter, which gives you color information, causes most of the frustration. And IRAF doesn’t handle three-color images very well, so that adds to the difficulty).
Now, to explain what is actually in the image. It’s the Hercules globular cluster, also known as Messier 13. It’s a group of stars in our galaxy that all formed from the same cloud of gas at roughly the same time. It’s 8 kiloparsecs away from us (26,000 light years), which is about one sixth of the diameter of the Milky Way.
Hopefully I’ll have some better pictures from Kitt Peak to put up soon. I still have all the data for an image of M101; I just need to make it into a nice picture.
—cts