Globular cluster
M2 (M2)
In Aquarius (Aqr) • Magnitude 6.5 • 16 arcminutes
Open the free AstroPlanner with M2 pre-selected, scored against your telescope, location, and the live cloud forecast.
One of the richest globular clusters in the sky, packing around 150,000 stars into a ball 175 light-years wide. At roughly 13 billion years old, it formed when the universe itself was still in its infancy — the stars you are imaging are almost as old as time.
M2 at a glance
| Catalog IDs | M2, N 7089 |
| Type | Globular cluster |
| Constellation | Aquarius (Aqr) |
| Right ascension | 21h 33m 29s |
| Declination | -00° 49' 12" |
| Apparent magnitude | 6.50 |
| Surface brightness | 12.0 mag/arcsec² |
| Angular size | 16.0 × 16.0 arcmin |
| Max altitude at 45°N | 44° |
| Best imaging months | May, Jun, Jul |
How to image M2
M2 sits in the constellation Aquarius at right ascension 21h 33m 29s and declination -00° 49' 12". To frame and integrate it well, AstroPlanner will compute the optimal moonless window for tonight from your location, the field-of-view fit against your sensor and focal length, the suggested total integration time given your aperture and sky Bortle class, and a cloud-aware schedule that drops it from the plan if your nearest cloud forecast spike overlaps the best altitude window.