Melotte 15 (George Simon)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Cassiopeia (Cas) · Contains: IC 1805

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Melotte 15

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Melotte 15

Published images of the Heart Nebula abound, and to be sure, I would have liked to add my own rendition of this showpiece object to the collection. However, that would require me to construct a mosaic, since the Heart is too large to fit into the FOV of my scope/camera combination. Unfortunately, constructing such a mosaic is not in the offing any time soon for me, due to constraints on my available time and a lack of consistently clear skies. Therefore, as an alternative, I decided to shoot Melotte 15, the open cluster that lies at the center of the Heart, and that is predominantly responsible for its shape and its illumination.

Melotte 15 is the loose grouping of brighter, white stars located towards the center of my image. (These stars appear white because they are saturated in my image. In reality, most of them are hot O and B type blue stars.) The stars of this cluster are on average only about 1.5 million years old, mere stellar infants. Melotte 15, like the Heart Nebula in which it is embedded, lies about 7500 light years from Earth. It is one of the constituent clusters of the larger Cas OB6 stellar association.

Also visible in my image, near the upper right-hand corner is another open cluster, designated Tombaugh 4, one of four open clusters discovered by Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto. While this cluster appears also to be embedded within the Heart Nebula, it is, in fact, considerably more distant, lying about 12,000 light years from Earth.

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Description: I changed the color balance a bit and brightened the nebulosity.

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Description: An incremental increase in saturation.

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Astrometry.net job	6687099
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Melotte 15

Melotte 15

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