Right Ascension	17 : 37.6 (h:m)
Declination	-03 : 15 (deg:m)
Distance	29.0 (kly)
Visual Brightness	7.6 (mag)
Apparent Dimension	11.7 (arc min)

Discovered by Charles Messier in 1764.

M14 is a slightly elliptically shaped stellar swarm, about 72 light years across and 29,000 light years away. It lacks a dense central condensation (Burnham), and contains a considerably large number of over 70 variables.

In 1938, a nove appeared in M14, which however was not discovered before 1964, when Amelia Wehlau of the University of Western Ontario surveyed a collection of photographic plates taken by Helen Sawyer Hogg between 1932 and 1963. This nova was visible on 8 plates, taken between June 21-28, 1938, as a 16th mag star. It was the second known nova in a globular cluster after that of 1860 in M80, T Scorpii, and the first one ever photographed.

Globular cluster M14 was the first CCD image taken, according to TheSky advertising.

Observing Reports for M14 (IAAC Netastrocatalog)

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Hartmut Frommert (spider@seds.org)
Christine Kronberg (smil@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)

Last Modification: 9 Dec 1999, 22:58 MET