Perseus Arm - Open Clusters

[Rob Sellent]

Due to chronic weather in Spain, it’s been almost a month since I’ve been able to head out and observe the night sky. However, forecast for Tuesday night was spot on and I was able to enjoy a good session on an extremely warm and still autumn evening. 

With the Vixen fluorite already cooled, I decided to focus attention around Cassiopeia and Perseus, mainly concentrating on objects within that part of the Perseus Arm which stretches across the sky from Cassiopeia through Perseus and later on in the season down to Auriga and Gemini.

As can be seen by the following image this area of the night sky is a rich source of targets for the amateur astronomer.

I started with NGC 957, a loose open cluster around 7,200 ight years away and the pretty yellow pair of stars known as h2143.

From here I then spent quite a while with the famous Double Double (NGC 884 & 869). Visible in the night sky as an indistinct smudge of light, enough has been written about this pair to know that it is a gorgeous expanse of blue-white supergiant stars sparkling amid a scattering of cooler red supergiants.

The 19mm Panoptic spilled over with stars and the more I spent at the eyepiece the more stars came into vision. At a similar distance from Earth to NGC 957, the Double lies over 7,000 light-years away and each of its clusters are several hundred light-years apart.

Guided by a paved arc of stars, pausing only to view the easy double Struve 230, I was greeted by Stock 2 or the Muscleman Cluster, about two moons wide and made up of around fifty or so icey blue stars. Hard as I tried I couldn’t see the headless muscleman and whilst not as showy as the Double Double, Stock 2 does have its own delicate beauty.

Other clusters picked up around this area were: NGC 743, 744, 957, 654, 663 and 659. NGC 663 otherwise known as the Lawnmower cluster, is a particularly stricking cluster worth hunting out. In the 4” there is a rich grouping of stars at its centre whilst dozens of other brightly lit stars gleam across its surface. At about the same distance from Earth as the other clusters we’ve seen, if viewing with more than a degree of field of view, one is also able to pick out the fainter cluster, NGC 659.

Moving up I spent a moment or two with the wide open cluster M103 before finishing my cluster evening with NGC 743 and the Owl cluster NGC 457.

A good three hours had passed by. I said goodnight to Pleiades rising above the garden’s gate and the princess of the autumn skies, M31 or the Andromeda galaxy.

As a final note of interest, the star light that was enjoyed this evening, left those gorgeous gems around the time the human race was getting on with the agricultural revolution. A revolution which introduced the necessary ingredient that would make civilisation and culture possible and with it the fruits of complexity, science and art but also all the problems we still face today, subjugation, warfare and endemic disease.

Edited September 26, 2019 by Rob Sellent

[Alan White]

Sounds like a great session with an equally great scope Rob.

I have a soft spot for that bit of sky myself.
When you say Double Double, I take it you mean Double Cluster?
NGC457 always brings a smile.

Thoroughly enjoyed your report and glad after such a run of bad weather that you got out.

 

[Marvin Jenkins]

What a great post. I will be making notes. Some of the objects I have seen but most not, and one persons view is different to another.

Your final paragraph about today’s problems are right on, in my opinion. I think science has proved that mankind was physically diminished in physical size by organised agriculture (not number)

However.... I understand that political social ideas are not allowed on this site. I stand to be corrected, but I have seen basic comments about current topics curtailed. I think the idea is, that it is all about astronomy, nothing else. And I agree.

Marvin