A double cluster or not?

by Mathew Wedel

I grew up in a wide-open, flat rural area, and on clear nights the bright stars and clusters of late summer and early autumn remind me of moonlight on the fields and the lights of distant towns. Many parts of the the Milky Way at this time of year are so packed with wonders that the sky seems almost cozy. Our targets this month are the open clusters NGC 1807 (magnitude 7.0) and NGC 1817 (magnitude 7.7), on the southern border of Taurus, the Bull. Or perhaps I should say our target, singular? The two groups of stars are equally distant, at about 5,900 light-years, and astrometric studies suggest that NGC 1807 may be simply a clump of 8th- to 10th-magnitude stars on the western edge of a single extended cluster,…

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Australian Sky & Telescope (Digital) - 1 Issue, March 2023

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