NGC 5897 is a very old globular cluster located in the southern constellation Libra. It was discovered by William Herschel in 1784/1785, and has a visual brightness of about 8.5 magnitudes, making it fairly easy to see with any telescope (Hartmut Frommert). NGC 5897’s stars are said to have low metallicity and a high abundance of elements produced by the alpha process, this leads to the conclusion that this star cluster formed before the galaxy formed a disk and spiral arms (Koch et al, 2014). This cluster is said to have lots of blue stragglers, which are stars that go away from the typical cluster evolution,  this in mind a color image of this cluster is pretty awesome.

In order to image such a large distant object in color I would need a telescope with capable filters of B, V, R and around 5 photos in each filter.  Using recommended exposure times (280 seconds of B, 240 seconds of V, and 220 seconds of R), Skynet’s prompt telescopes did just that. After receiving my 15 photos I stacked them all corresponding to there filter and color mapped them to blue (B), green (V), and red(R). I then stacked the three color photos to get one RGB photo which looked a little blurry.

This image is pretty cool, however the colors are not accurate and appear more red, In order to fix this I needed to get some more data for this cluster. To do this I used Skynet’s Cluster Graph Pro with GAIA and 2MASS data to plot the clusters evolution. This program was pretty neat and all you have to do is change the data until the model line matches up with the data.  This however was quite difficult due to, what I later suspected, blue stragglers.  Below is the data I found followed by its graph.

RA	DEC	Distance	Log(age)	Metallicity	E(B-V
-5.413 +/- 0.16 mas/yr	-3.4 +/- 0.161 mas/yr	9.71 kpc +/- 20%	10.2 (about 16 billion)	-1.89 solar	0.19 mag

Now with the found E(B-V) value I can de-redden my image and get an accurate color photo. In this photo there are many little white smudges (possibly white dwarfs?) and many bright blue stragglers. Below is the final color photo.

The next step of my research was to compare it to a study done by Kharchenko et all (2013), who found these parameters: 

Log(age)	Metallicity	E(B-V)
10.1	-1.745 solar	0.094 mag

I then plotted the Gaia data with these parameters and upon adjusting the E(B-V) to 0.15, the majority of data fit better into the turnoff point compared to my graph,  this graph however shows a group of blue stragglers which go off the horizontal branch to which I have no idea why they are there. Below is the graph using this data.

In conclusion, I had a lot of fun examining this old cluster, and I am fascinated by its population of blue stragglers and its strange composition of stars.