Sky & Telescope - February 2022 - 34

DOUBLE CLUSTER: RON BRECHER; ALL SKETCHES BY GUY MACKIE
Season's Sparklers
a 6.4-magnitude yellow one, lies on the northern side. Despite
a rich Milky Way field, both clusters are reasonably separated
from the Milky Way. In binoculars an arc of bright sparklers
leads from NGC 869 to the large open cluster Stock 2.
Heading over to Cancer, we find the Beehive Cluster,
M44. Praesepe, as it's also known, was used in ancient times
as a weather predictor - its disappearance from a starry sky
due to thin, high cirrostratus clouds rolling in indicated an
approaching weather system.
I spent a recent weather-free night enjoying the Beehive.
My 7×50s resolved it into more than 30 stars, and the central
V was prominent. In the 80-mm apo at 25× I saw about 100
stars, 40 of which are bright. At 67× three signature trios are
prominent, as are nine pairs. The 80-mm provides enough
aperture to show M44 well, except that the color in the trios
doesn't stand out. The V that was so discernible in the 7×50s
is obvious at low power, but it doesn't dominate the view of
the cluster like it did earlier that same night in binoculars.
M44 is much too large for my observatory's 16-inch Newtonian,
but its brilliant stars show their colors well in that
scope. The brightest jewel in each of M44's three triangles is
golden; two triangles also boast a blue star.
The huge Hyades is a cluster for the unaided eye and
binoculars. The V-shaped group represents the head of
Taurus, the Bull, and its brightest star - orange Aldebaran
- his angry eye. But Aldebaran is actually a foreground star
at a distance of about 65 light-years, while the cluster lies at
around 150 light-years. Two easy, wide, naked-eye pairs lie on
or near the left-hand stalk of the V. Theta1 (θ1) and Theta2
(θ2) Tauri are about 5.8′ apart, while Sigma1 (σ1) and Sigma2
(σ2) Tauri are 7.4′ apart. In the latter pair, only the brighter
component, Sigma2 (magnitude 4.7), is a cluster member.
The fainter pair of 80 Tauri and 81 Tauri is just as wide as the
Theta pair, but I had to use my 7×50 binoculars to make the
split. The 7×50s " widen " the V by adding many more stars -
I counted about 87 in total.
If you have a dark sky, look for the naked-eye cluster
NGC 1647 (a William Herschel discovery from 1784) at the
open end of the Hyades. My 8-inch at 76× reveals about 80
scattered, fairly equal-magnitude stars in the cluster, and a
bright wide pair marks the center.
Big and showy NGC 2451 in Puppis is obvious with the
unaided eye. It consists of two clusters superimposed along
our line of sight, with NGC 2451B some 400 light-years (or
more) farther away than NGC 2451A, which is at around 600
light-years. My first view of it and adjacent NGC 2477 was in
November 1996 through my 7×50s from downtown Faro, Portugal,
at latitude 37°N from the roof of an apartment building
across the street from the ocean. This was on the night that I
first saw Canopus skimming the waves, extremely low over the
uYEAR-ROUND DELIGHT The shimmering Perseus pair NGC 869 and NGC 884 are known as the Double
Cluster. For many northern latitudes, the duo are circumpolar, i.e., they never set, which means you can enjoy
them all year round. Remember to check them out next August when you're out looking for Perseid meteors.
34 FEBRUARY 2022 * SKY & TELESCOPE

Sky & Telescope - February 2022

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