Messier 4 is a ball of stars (globular cluster) located about 7,200 light years away from the Earth in the southern constellation of Scorpius. It contains several tens of thousand stars and is home to many white dwarfs, the cores of dying stars. Studies indicate that Messier 4 is over 12 billion years old. It has roughly the same apparent size as the full Moon and is visible to the naked eye in exceptionally good conditions. Charles Messier, the 18th century French astronomer, catalogued over 100 galaxies and clusters. Through the telescopes available at the time, comets, nebulae, globular clusters and galaxies appeared just as faint, diffuse blobs. This picture was obtained with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.