It may well be that sky conditions on the 7th April didn’t lend themselves too well to imaging this object (I took just an hour of 2 min RGB subs) but processing it was unlike any other cluster I've tried, as I found it difficult to resolve the stars of the cluster. It is believed to be the remainder of part of a galaxy that was stripped away when it had a fight with our galaxy billions of years ago and as such is indeed a very strange object! Although it is in orbit with our galaxy, Its distance lies far beyond other globular clusters and suggests it may have had had a violent past to have such an elongated orbit which takes over 3 billion years to go around our galaxy. At around 300,000 LY from the centre of our galaxy, NGC 2419 would be the best and brightest globular for any observers in the Andromeda Galaxy, looking for globular clusters in our galaxy, since it lies outside the obscuring density of the main disk.
It is tiny with my setup however, and blowing it up produces a somewhat blurry image, but this may improve when I try again under better conditions. A fascinating if enigmatic object to image!
Click on an image to get a closer view
NGC2419 intergalactic wanderer
Chris Bowden
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