Crown of Jewels
Composite-Feb2008clusters-lowrez
Originally uploaded by v-ger
The night sky in February contains an immense number of open star clusters and globular clusters. Here’s some of them, composed together into a composite photo, with thanks again to Slooh.com whose remote telescope cameras created the raw data for these images, which I then altered in Photoshop. Clusters are M50, M12, M13 (two different exposures), M37, M93, M107, and the Gold Dust Cluster (center).
Clusters like these vary from incredibly dense — hundreds of thousands of stars packed into a space only a couple hundred light years across — to not all that dense except for the angle that we happen to see the group from. Measurements of the light reveal the chemical structure of these groups. Some contain few or no metals, meaning that they are very old compared to newer groups.
If nothing else, they are spectacular and beautiful, easy to find in smaller telescopes.
