Before the Hubble Space Telescope ultraviolet astronomy was limited to small telescopes launched on rockets and balloons. This remarkably clear 2,200 angstrom image of 47 Tucanae was taken with the HST’s wide field planetary camera (WFPC) even prior to the November 1993 servicing mission that replaced the instrument and fixed the telescope’s blurry vision. The image is 11 arc seconds on a side and shows an area that is less than one quarter of the distance from Earth to our nearest star, Proxima Centauri. If so many stars were in our portion of the galaxy, the sky would be fantastically bright, even at night. 
    The most interesting feature in this image is a group of 21 exceptionally bright stars. These are