NGC 7127 A Confusing Open Cluster

NGC 7127 is listed as an open cluster in northeastern Cygnus. I'd normally give a distance at this point but my research turned up nothing but confusion. I found only one reference, a Polish Wiki page, that gave a distance. They gave a distance of 4700 light-years. But when I checked the footnote for the distance that took me to a SEDS page on the cluster that never gave a distance! WEBDA, my usual go-to source for open clusters, had nothing on it but a position. But several of the stars were bright enough that parallax data from Hipparcos was available from The Sky's data base. That gave distances to 4 apparent cluster members, two about 200 light-years and two of about 2000 light-years. These were the 4 most "obvious" cluster members. If right it would indicate this is not an open cluster at all but an asterism. So I went to the papers listed at SIMBAD. The first is for a galaxy NGC 7217! Yikes wrong object entirely. But I have taken this galaxy! http://www.spacebanter.com/attachmen...tid=3763&stc=1 The other references at least applied to open clusters.

One says it is a real open cluster with an age of 100,000,000 years and a distance of 5700 parsecs (18,500 light-years). So that means the 4 stars with Hipparcos data are foreground stars. http://cdsbib.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/c...6A...542A..68P

The cluster/object looks to be in two parts one to the northwest and the other to the southeast. But this is seeing it projected in 2D. The 3 dimensions it may be quite different.

The cluster/object was discovered by John Herschel on September 25, 1829.

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

Rick