This week we re-visit one of the most interesting globular clusters in the sky. Although Messier was convinced that it was just a "nebula containing no stars", the view in a modern telescope of moderate size is a mind boggling burst of jewels.
M5 is about 27,000 light years away and if the Sun were at this distance, it would be a magnitude 19 star, only visible in long exposure photographs. The reason we see M5 at all is because it contains a large population of very large red giant stars, each of which is several thousand times brighter than the Sun.
All film photos taken with the...JSP ASTROCAMERA