NCG 956

[Paz]

Last Friday night I was out for a short spell with the ST120 and I was about to pack up after finishing on M34 when I noticed a small open cluster on the map just above (in altitude terms), called NCG 956. This was only 2.5 degrees away from M34 so I thought why not check it out quickly before packing up.

My notebook says "...should be an easy find in same 9x50 field as M34 but no - very hard. Think I got it eventually but... [I drew a picture that in hindsight looks like the right spot] NCG 956 was in center when M34 was at bottom of finder view. Definitely does not look like a cluster - looks like field stars."

I spent a long time checking it out, gong back to M34, finding it again, checking it on Sky Safari and spent most of that time thinking I was somehow missing it but in the end I was sure I had the spot and gave it a good look resulting in my last comments. I came in much later than planned!

Sky Safari says its an open cluster 8500LY away 9 minutes of arc and Mag 8.9.

I like to know what I've been looking in detail at so I end up on a mission looking for anything I can find about it and have finally turned this up...

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/bib_query?2008AN....329..602M

...it's been found that it is not an open cluster but just a chance alignment of stars - Doh!

[Demonperformer]

This website can be useful for visual descriptions of the NGC & IC objects - although most were made with a large reflector, so expectations need to be toned-down a bit!

[Paz]

On 27/09/2016 at 06:20, Demonperformer said:

This website can be useful for visual descriptions of the NGC & IC objects - although most were made with a large reflector, so expectations need to be toned-down a bit!

Thanks for the link, that is a serious amount of observing notes!

[DeepSkyBagger]

Don't kick yourself about this, Paz. Any genuine observation is valid. I know from much looking that there's many a genuine open cluster out there that looks feeble compared to some asterisms. There's no way you can tell if a group of stars in your field is a genuine gravitationally-bound cluster or, as it appears in this case, a chance alignment. So what's the difference from a visual perspective? None.

You made a valid observation of an NGC object, so well done.

BTW, another valid observation is 'not seen'!