Dotted around our Galaxy in a spherical halo are more than a hundred ball shaped conglomerations of stars known as Globular Clusters. These each contain from a hundred thousand to several million stars, all bound together by gravity. Several globular clusters are visible with the naked eye or binoculars. The brightest are ω (omega) Centauri and 47 Tucanae, both is in southern hemisphere the best example is M13(picture above) in Hercules.
To the naked eye and in binoculars, these objects appears as softly glowing patches of light. Moderate size telescopes stars to resolve some of the individual red giant stars, giving the clusters a speckled appearance.
Globular Clusters formed early in the history of the galaxy and contains some of the most ancient stars known, 10,000 million years and more old, or over twice the age of our Sun.
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