Hubble's Latest Image Showcases Rare Exception: Massive 120-Light-Year Globular ClusterHubble Space Telescope Reveals Stunning Image of Distant Globular Cluster NGC 1651. Credit: scitechdaily.com

The Hubble Space Telescope captures an image of a globular cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud:

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured an image of a globular cluster, named NGC 1651, found in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, approximately 162,000 light-years away.

This week's image showcases the globular cluster that dominates the frame, unlike most Pictures of the Week which feature entire galaxies. These clusters typically span 10 to 300 light-years in diameter, but NGC 1651 is an exception with a diameter of approximately 120 light-years.

This brings to light a common misconception that large telescopes like Hubble can zoom in on celestial objects, similar to how a specialized camera on Earth operates. However, unlike smaller telescopes, large telescopes have a fixed "field of view," which determines the size of the sky region it can observe in a single observation.

Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), specifically its ultraviolet/visible light channel, was used to collect the data for this image. The instrument has a field of view about one-twelfth the diameter of the Moon as seen from Earth. Therefore, every observation made by WFC3 captures a specific size of the sky.

Despite this limitation, Hubble is able to observe objects of vastly different sizes due to two main reasons. Firstly, the apparent size of an object is determined by its distance from Earth, meaning that even though a distant galaxy might be much larger than a nearby globular cluster, it can still appear smaller in the sky. In fact, a faint spiral galaxy can be seen on the left side of the image, but it is easily missed among the foreground stars.

Secondly, multiple images of different parts of the sky can be stitched together to create a single image of an object that is too large for Hubble's field of view. This is a difficult and time-consuming process, and is not typically done for Pictures of the Week. However, it has been successfully done for some of Hubble's most iconic images.

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