The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a new image of the star cluster Messier 30 (M30), also catalogued as NGC 7099. The photograph shows the dense concentration of stars that characterises this globular cluster, one of the best-known objects of its kind in the Messier catalogue.

Globular clusters such as M30 are swarms of hundreds of thousands of stars bound gravitationally into a compact spherical structure. They are among the oldest stellar systems in the Milky Way, so studying them allows astronomers to reconstruct the star formation and chemical enrichment history of our galaxy. Their stellar populations thus serve as an archive of galactic history.

The image joins the long series of observations with which Hubble has helped characterise globular clusters at a resolution unattainable from the ground. Such observations allow individual stars to be resolved in the cluster's central regions and their photometric properties to be studied with great precision.

Messier 30 is located in the constellation Capricornus and was discovered by Charles Messier in 1764. Hubble's high-resolution images remain a reference for testing models of stellar dynamics and globular cluster evolution.