M22, Sagittarius, Stellarvue SV78S f6, MX7C, 60min

Information courtesy of SEDS

M22 is a very remarkable object; lying about 10,000 light years distant, its 24' angular diameter correspond to a linear of about 65 light years. It is visible to the naked eye for observers at not too northern latitudes, as it is brighter than the Hercules globular cluster M13 and outshined only by the two bright southern globulars (not in Messier's catalog), Omega Centauri (NGC 5139) and 47 Tucanae (NGC 104) - this is the ranking of the four brightest in the sky.

M22 is one of the nearer globular clusters at 10,400 light years. While Shapley and Pease counted 70,000 stars in this great stellar swarm, only the relatively small number of 32 variables has been identified, half of them already known to Bailey in 1902, among them a long-period Mira variable which is probably not a member. The brightest stars are about mag 11. The stars are spread over a region roughly 200 light years in diameter, and receding from us at 144 km/sec.

This cluster is notable because it contains a weak planetary nebula, discovered by the infrared satellite IRAS and cataloged as IRAS 18333-2357 or GJJC 1. This planetary was the second discovered in a globular cluster after Pease 1 in M15, and one of only four known planetary nebula in Milky Way globular clusters.

Recent Hubble Space Telescope investigations of M22 have led to the discovery of a considerable number of planet-sized objects which appear to float through this globular cluster; these objects may have masses of only 80 times that of Earth, and were discovered by so-called micro lensing effects, i.e. bending of light of background member stars of the cluster