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ASTRO: NGC 2266



 
 
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Old July 18th 14, 06:34 AM posted to alt.binaries.pictures.astro
Rick Johnson[_2_]
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Default ASTRO: NGC 2266

NGC 2266 is another Herschel 400 open cluster. William Herschel
discovered it on December 7, 1785 with his trusty 20' reflector with an
18.7" mirror. It is located in Gemini 1.8 degrees north of Mebsuta
(Epsilon Geminorum). It is about 5 minutes of arc across and 11,000
light-years distant. WEBDA puts its age at 630 million years though
APOD and other sources say 1 billion years. Either way it is a rather
unusually old open cluster. It spends most of its time well above or
below the galaxy's plane so escapes a lot of the tidal forces that rip
apart much younger clusters. The red stars in it give away its age as
does the lack of really blue stars. Being well above the plane of the
galaxy it is only reddened about 0.1 magnitude.

My notes from March 16, 1985 of it visually in my 10" f/5 at 60x reads:
"Large triangular shaped open cluster. A bright slightly curved line of
brighter stars defines one side of the triangle. If the brighter stars
are ignored the cluster is nearly circular." I assume that curved line
is the line of mostly red stars that ends at the white star at the
southwestern tip. In my image it looks triangular no matter if you
leave out the brighter stars or not. Otherwise it seems to fit my
visual description quite well.

The bright white star at its southwest edge is listed in The Sky as
being 1160 light-years away so is unrelated to the cluster. Many images
I found of this cluster on line show it as rather blue but it came out
virtually white with my color balance. This bothered me until I looked
it up and found it is a G0 star. Those are virtually white. So where
do so many come up with a blue tint to it?

There are a few galaxies around it. Only one had a redshift listed at
NED and that one is a flat galaxy! I've noted it and all galaxies
listed in NED even if the rest had no magnitude or distance values.
Some were UV sources and very blue. Without spectral data they may be
quasars as they seem to have starlike point spread functions.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10' STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Rick
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