Messier 52 (M52) is a bright open cluster located in the northern constellation Cassiopeia.
The cluster has an apparent magnitude of 5.0 and lies at an approximate distance of 5,000 light years from Earth. It has the designation NGC 7654 in the New General Catalogue.
The distance to M52 has not been established with any degree of certainty because of a high interstellar absorption of the cluster’s light. Estimates are generally in the range from 3,000 to 7,000 light years.
Messier 52 contains 193 probable members within a region 9 arc minutes in radius.
The brightest main sequence star in the cluster is magnitude 11 and belongs to the spectral class B7. The brightest of all stars in M52 has the spectral classification F9 and a visual magnitude of 7.77. The cluster has an estimated age of 35 million years.
Messier 52 lies near another prominent deep sky object, the Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635). The emission nebula can be seen about 35 arc minutes southwest of the cluster. It was discovered by William Herschel in 1787. The Bubble Nebula lies at a much greater distance from us than the cluster – 11,000 light years – and the two are not physically related.
The cluster was discovered by Charles Messier, who catalogued it on September 7, 1774 with the following note:
Cluster of very small stars, mingled with nebulosity, which can be seen only with an achromatic telescope. It was when he observed the Comet which appeared in this year that M. Messier saw this cluster, which was close to the comet on the 7th of September 1774; it is below the star d Cassiopeiae: that star was used to determine [the position of] both the cluster of stars & the comet."
--Messier-Objects.com
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Messier52 - WikipediaMessier52 - Astropixels.comMessier52 - SEDSThis is image #40 in long term project to photograph the complete Messier catalog. Happy with this one,again is not most spectacular object but interesting object, nice colours variation and in a nice star field. RGB each image 300 seconds.Was done with very bright moon but I now have better system to determine azimuth and elevation of moon as related to objectand seem to have quite better results.
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