Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Puppis (Pup)  ·  Contains:  NGC 2451  ·  c Pup
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NGC 2451, Gary Imm
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NGC 2451

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NGC 2451, Gary Imm
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NGC 2451

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Description

This object is a beautiful open cluster located 600 light years away in the southern constellation of Puppis. It is one of the earliest sky object discoveries, by Giovanni Battista Hodierna around 1650.

The brightest star in the center, 3.6 magnitude c Puppis, has been called many different colors by astronomers over the years, from very red, to orange, to yellow. It looks orange to me in this calibrated image.

Like many other open clusters, astronomers have debated whether this was truly a cluster or simply a collection of bright stars. In 1994, German astronomers Siegfried Roser and Ulrich Bastian determined that many of the bright stars with similar proper motion belonged to a cluster called the Puppis Moving Group (NGC 2451a). They also proposed, and it was later confirmed, that a second distant cluster (NGC 2451b) exists further away at 1200 light years along the same line of sight. I cannot see an indication of a distant cluster in this image.

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NGC 2451, Gary Imm

In these collections

Open Clusters