On the night of August 19, 2020 I pointed my 8" SCT to the constellation Sagittarius to get a view of the globular cluster M75. This globular cluster was very faint between a mix of the light pollution in my southern skies, and the fact that this is a small, distant, and faint globular cluster to begin with. M75 in my 24mm eyepiece had hardly any resolvable stars in the globular cluster, but it had a bit of texture to it. I couldn't really point out any one star, but there were brighter 'blobs' in the haze of the globular structure.
M75 has a magnitude around 9, and is quite distant at 67,500 light years away from Earth. It takes up 6.8 arc minutes in the sky which equates to a linear diameter of 134 light years. This globular cluster is one of the most densely packed globular clusters, and one of the most centrally concentrated globulars in the Messier catalog. M75 is also the second most distant globular cluster, with M54 being the furthest away.
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| M75 Globular Cluster in Sagittarius |
This sketch was done on black canson paper with the field stars marked out with a white charcoal pencil. I then used a kneaded eraser to dim some of the stars for a more realistic star field. The haze and blotchy look to the globular cluster was created using a white pastel pencil and a blending stump. I did a little bit of stippling with the white pastel pencil and then used the blending stump to create the brighter 'blobs' I could make out in the cluster.
If you would like to know where to find this object in the night sky and see a time lapse of me sketching this object then check out the video below:
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