"The light that burns twice as bright burns for half as long"

The Meteor and Messier 13
'Artist's impression of the view through the eyepiece'

Last night was clear and starry, so I went outside, set up my telescope and looked out through the disc of our galaxy and viewed a number of the globular clusters that buzz around the outskirts of the Milky Way.

Whilst I was looking through a wide angle eyepiece, at the Great Globular Cluster M13, a bright white meteor shot across my field of vision leaving behind a short lived  trail of ionised gas.  This brief but stunningly beautiful image remained in my mind's eye for the rest of the observing session.  After midnight I used my telescope to capture a few images of the sky in the vicinity of M13 and today set about composing an artist's impression of the meteor 'blazing past' the seemingly static and unchanging star cluster.

M13 is a ball of ancient and gravitationally bound stars with a combined mass equivalent to 60 million Suns, it is located in the constellation Hercules and is approximately 25,000 light years from Earth.  The meteor in stark contrast is an ephemeral interloper marking the vaporisation of a bit of space debris , probably no larger than a pebble, as  friction with the upper layers of our atmosphere, caused it first to glow and then to burn up some 85 kms above the surface of the Earth.

On a moonless night, you can view M13 with a pair of 10x50mm binoculars.  It will look like a hazy little ball amongst the stars.  Look first for the very bright star Vega and then the 'Keystone' of four stars in Hercules. The globular star clusters M13 and M92 are not hard to find.

M13  photographed from our backyard
using my Meade 127mm. refractor and a Canon 400d DSLR camera.

Credits; Star map Wikipedia