Every astronomer dreams of having his or her name on a discovered deep sky object. Although these days (with the advent of deep imaging astrophotography and the discovery daily of new nebulae) such object namings are becoming common, only a few such object names have worked their way into our common language. Some of my favorites include
Stephan's Quintet,
Zwicky's Nonet,
Hoag’s Object,
Wolf's Cave Nebula, and
Burbidge’s Chain. Some objects are even named after people who did not discover them, such as
Pickering’s Triangle (now known as Fleming’s Triangular Wisp).
It is interesting to me that one of the most unlikely of people has his name on 3 different objects, someone who likely didn’t even strive to have his name assigned to them.
Father Lucien Kemble, a Canadian Franciscan friar and amateur astronomer, noticed several asterisms in the sky and wrote about them in a letter in 1980 to the Sky & Telescope magazine columnist and famous astronomer Walter Scott Houston. In time, Houston labelled these 3 asterisms Kemble’s Kite,
Kemble 2, and my favorite,
Kemble’s Cascade. Like most asterisms, these objects are much more fun to see in the eyepiece than in an image, and are best viewed through binoculars.
Kemble’s Kite consists of about 20 orange, blue and white stars, with magnitudes ranging from 6 to 11. It is located in the constellation of Cassiopeia at a declination of +72 and a right ascension of 3 hrs 27 min.
In addition to the kite asterism, notice the oval asterism towards the top center of the image.
Ironically, and a bit sadly, the first entry in a Google search of this asterism turns up images of it that are incorrect, barely looking like a kite and located far away from this object.
If you enjoy asterisms, please see my collection of them
here.
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