Massive Galaxy NGC 5322 (2014)

Globular clusters galore dot around this brightest cluster galaxy. You might guess that they are background galaxies and it’s easy to mistake them for that or even a dim foreground star but a good portion of the fuzzy little dots here are globular clusters. If it’s perfectly round, rather bright (but not one of the two big spiky foreground stars), and rather compact, it’s very likely you are looking at a globular cluster.

If you look very closely, you can also see a dusty disk surrounding the very bright nucleus, as well.

Red: HST_9427_09_ACS_WFC_F814W_sci
Green: Pseudo
Blue: HST_9427_09_ACS_WFC_F435W_sci

Additionally, these data were used to fill in some of the chip gap, but not all. The rest of the chip gap was filled with the same data cloning method previously described here.

hst_05454_0c_wfpc2_f814w_wf_sci
hst_05454_0c_wfpc2_f555w_wf_sci

North is NOT up. It is 3.6° counter-clockwise from up.

Copyright information:
Hubble data is public domain, but I put a lot of work into combining it into beautiful color images. The minimal credit line should read: NASA / ESA / J. Schmidt

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.