When he discovered this object in 1764, Charles Messier described it as a nebula without stars. Obviously he was wrong, but this points out a primary difference between the efficacy of using your eyes to observe things in our digital age when ccd cameras can see details like this through a four inch refractor telescope. This is a stacked and cropped image of 40 two minute exposures taken with RGB filters by a 9.2 megapixel CCD camera.

“For the same reasons that M13 is popular, globular cluster M14 is not. It is beyond the normal naked-eye limit and lies in a region of the sky belonging to an obscure constellation that never gets very high in the sky from mid-northern latitudes, yet M14 is surprisingly detailed and deserves special attention.”

Stephen James O’Meara “The Messier Objects”