Terzan 1 or ESO 455-23 and Terzan 1966, is one of 150 globular clusters discovered by the French astronomer Agop Terzan in the 1960s and 1970s when he was working at the Lyon observatory.
This highly obscured globular cluster is located about 21,800 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Scorpio.
Of the 150 globular clusters that belong to our Milky Way, about 70 are located 13,000 light-years from the galactic center, where their density tends to peak. However, Terzan 1 has the smallest projected distance to the center of the Milky Way among all known globulars. It is only 4,200 light-years from the galactic center.
Is this the first time Hubble has captured it?
No way. This is not a new target for Hubble. We were previously able to see a snapshot of the globular cluster in 2015, taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). That instrument was replaced by the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) during Hubble’s 2009 servicing mission, giving the telescope greater resolving power and field of view, something we can clearly see in the new Terzan 1 image. .
Hubble’s most recent capture is based on data obtained through visible light and two infrared filters. The color, as we have already explained on other occasions, about these astronomical images, results from assigning different tones to each monochrome image associated with an individual filter (infrared, X-rays, etc.)
Referencia: Hubble Space Telescope / NASA / ESA / Hubble