M14
Globular Cluster

Discovered 1764 by Charles Messier.

M14 is a slightly elliptically shaped stellar swarm, about 100 light years across and about 30,000 light years away; older determinations have given values between 64,000 ly (Shapley) and 23,000 (Mallas/Kreimer) to 24,000 ly (Glyn Jones, Kinman, Becvar); the Sky Catalogue 2000.0 had 38,000 ly. Shapley assigned it an ellipticity of 9, extended in position angle 110 deg. While its bright main body about only about 3 arc minutes in angular diameter, the cluster's outlayers reach out to a total apparent diameter of 11.7 arc min. It lacks a dense central condensation (Burnham), as its concentration class VIII indicates. Its apparent visual brightness of 7.6 visual magnitudes corresponds to an absolute magnitude of -9.12, or to a luminosity about 400,000 times that of our sun - so while, because of its greater distance, it is apparently dimmer than the two other great Ophiuchus clusters, M10 and M12, it is intrinsically much more luminous.

Source: seds.org