Antares Red Super Giant Star

Antares and Globular Star Cluster  Messier4..Composite crop of stacks of images taken with the Canon 200d and 600d DSLR cameras. Credit: Kurt Thrust

 The constellation Scorpius the Scorpion is only partially visible from the United Kingdom. Every June the red giant star Antares, alpha Scorpii, is just visible above the roof of the buildings that adjoin the Jodrell Plank Observatory. The images were captured from a first floor window in the Observatory Visitor Centre using a fixed tripod which restricted the exposure time of each light frame to 5 seconds. 

Antares is a slow irregular variable star with an apparent visual magnitude that fades from 0.6 to 1.6 and back again.  Antares is a Red Super Giant Star that looks red when viewed with the naked eye. It's actual size is not accurately known but it is thought that if it were located at the centre of our Solar System its surface would extend out to somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. Antares has a mass calculated to be twelve times that of the Sun.

Antares is approximately 550 light years distant from Earth. Antares illuminates foreground parts of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex. The illuminated cloud is sometimes referred to as the Antares Nebula.

Messier 4 is a fairly loose globular star cluster with a diameter of 75 light years. It is located at a distance of  7200 light years and is the nearest Globular Star Cluster to the Solar System.. Its stars are  ancient with an estimated age of 12.2 billion years. The Hubble Space Telescope has identified white dwarf stars within M4 with ages of over 13 billion years. There is thought to be a millisecond pulsar neutron star binary pair amongst the stars of this cluster." - Joel Cairo CEO of the Jodrell Plank Observatory.

Uncropped more nebulous version of the above image

Credit: Astrometry Net