Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Perseus (Per)  ·  Contains:  NGC 869  ·  NGC 884  ·  The star 7Per  ·  The star 8Per  ·  chi Persei Cluster  ·  h Persei Cluster
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The Perseus Double Cluster NGC884/NGC869, John Kulin
The Perseus Double Cluster NGC884/NGC869
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The Perseus Double Cluster NGC884/NGC869

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The Perseus Double Cluster NGC884/NGC869, John Kulin
The Perseus Double Cluster NGC884/NGC869
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The Perseus Double Cluster NGC884/NGC869

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I nearly forgot about this little gem of the night skies, a really lovely double cluster that wasn't too bad to process. Just over 4 hours of data.

I still have a slight issue with my backfocus, which I can work on in the summer nights.

Here's the bumf: -

A great naked eye telescope sight in a wide angle eyepiece, this is the wonderful Double Cluster in Perseus, although it's easier to find by looking down from the left hand side of the W of Cassiopeia. This sparkling pair of clusters are among the youngest known in the galaxy, easily visible without optics in dark sky as a hazy patch 4 degrees west-northwest of eta Persei.

The Double Cluster has been known since antiquity as a faint cloud in the northern Milky Way. William Herschel first discovered the nature of this pair, now catalogued as NGC 884 and NGC 869. Each cluster contains some 300 stars, some of which are immensely bright: 50,000x more luminous than our Sun.

The clusters probably formed out of the same molecular cloud in the Perseus Arm only 3-5 million years ago, making them among the youngest star clusters known. The Pleiades, by comparison, is more than 100 million years old. Despite their great distance of some 7,000 light years, the two clusters span 1.5-2.0 degrees of sky, so use a low-power eyepiece to take them all in...40mm on my old 14" f/10 scope used to work well..

The view in a telescope is truly breathtaking,. There are many colours in these young stars: sapphire blue, topaz, white, and the red glow of swelling giant stars moving towards their violent end as supernovae. If the Double Cluster were as close as the Pleiades, they would span a quarter of the northern sky. Many of its 600 stars would shine as bright as Vega. Quite a thing!

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The Perseus Double Cluster NGC884/NGC869, John Kulin