Globular Cluster 47 Tucanae - Diamonds in the sky

What a wonderful and amazing scheme have we here of the magnificent vastness of the Universe! So many Suns, so many Worlds!

CHRISTIAN HUYGENS (ca. 1670)

47 Tucanae (NGC 104) is a globular cluster located in the constellation Tucana. It is the second brightest globular cluster after Omega Centauri and is a must-see in the southern sky.

This object was discovered by Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille, one of the pioneering astronomers who dared to measure the scale of the solar system. In an expedition to the Cape of Good Hope in 1750, he accidentally discovered this object when observing the stars. At first, he thought it was the bright core of a comet; but when he raised his telescope to the target, he saw ten thousand stars bound together in a cluster, shining like diamonds in the sky!

Modern science revealed that there are up to a million stars in this cluster, all born from the same gas cloud some 10 billion years ago. To quote another great astronomer Christian Huygens: " What a wonderful and amazing scheme have we here of the magnificent vastness of the Universe! So many Suns, so many Worlds! " (ca. 1670).

(The original data was acquired from iTelescope, which I processed using pixinsight and photoshop).