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Hubble Eyes a Brilliant Star Cluster

A field of blue-white, reddish-gold, and white stars fills the view
ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Cohen

This image taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows Terzan 1, a globular cluster that lies about 22,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius. It is one of 11 globular clusters that were discovered by the Turkish-Armenian astronomer Agop Terzan between 1966 and 1971 when he was working in France, based mostly at Lyon Observatory.

Terzan 1 is not a new target for Hubble. An image of the cluster was released back in 2015, taken by Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). That instrument was replaced by the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) during the 2009 Hubble servicing mission. WFC3 has both superior resolving power and a wider field of view than WFPC2, and the improvement is obvious in this fantastically detailed image.

Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)

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