Seeing through the dust

I admit it: I’m a globular cluster junkie. Before I got into amateur astronomy I’d never heard of these beautiful spherical arrays containing tens to hundreds of thousands of ancient suns. Now, nothing quite matches the real-time visual experience of a fully resolved globular. But therein lies the rub. Of the approximately 150 globular clusters in our Milky Way galaxy, relatively few resolve into myriad stars through standard backyard telescopes. The problem is not just one of distance, although the distances to most of these clusters are enormous. The bigger problem is interstellar dust.

William Herschel thought “the holes in the heavens” represented an absence of stars. American astronomer E.E. Barnard, even with his decades of photographing these “vacuities,” was slow to embrace the concept that interstellar matter exists and can block more distant