Sir William Herschel estimated their number
to be about fourteen thousand, but in fact they are uncountable. If we
could view them from a point just within the edge of the assemblage,
they would offer the appearance of a hollow hemisphere emblazoned with
stars of astonishing brilliancy; the near-by ones unparalleled in
splendor by any celestial object known to us, while the more distant
ones would resemble ordinary stars. An inhabitant of the cluster would
not know, except by a process of ratiocination, that he was dwelling
in a globular assemblage of suns; only from a point far outside would
their spherical arrangement become evident to the eye. Imagine
fourteen-thousand fire-balloons with an approach to regularity in a
spherical space -- say, ten miles in diameter; there would be an
average of less than thirty in every cubic mile, and it would be
necessary to go to a considerable distance in order to see them as a
globular aggregation; yet from a point sufficiently far away they
would blend into a glowing ball.
Photographs show even better than the best telescopic views that the
great cluster is surrounded with a multitude of dispersed stars,
suggestively arrayed in more or less curving lines, which radiate from
the principle mass, with which their connection is manifest.
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