ASTRO: NGC 0663, lost on my hard drive for 3.5 years

NGC 663 is an open cluster in Cassiopeia. It made my list by being a
Herschel 400 object from his first list. My log entry, right after I'd
noted a nearby tiny open cluster NGC 659 which I imaged back on November
3, 2010, reads: "Large, scattered cluster of more than 50 stars. A very
good cluster after all the small, tight, faint ones on the list." That
last bit a reference to NGC 659. Most sources credit the cluster with
some 400 stars rather than the 50 I estimated visually in my 10" f/5
scope. So why did it take so long for me to get this one right near the
small one? The answer is it didn't. I took NGC 663 on November 9,
2010, less than a week later. Yep I did it again. In yet another sweep
of the hard drive I turned up yet another lost object! I spent hours
making sure I'd finally found them all and now this one pops up. I
wasn't even looking for lost files. Instead I was verifying all had
been backed up and this one wasn't on the backup drive but was on both
the hard drive of the imaging computer from 2010, no longer being used,
and on my processing computer but not on the "to process" log. That
explains how it got lost. William Herschel discovered it on November 3,
1787. I almost took it on the 223rd anniversary of its discovery.

Anyway looking up the cluster I find some disagreement. WEBDA puts it
at 6360 light-years distant and about 16 million years of age. Various
sources at Wikipedia say it is 6850 light-years away and 20 to 25
million years old. Not all that major of a disagreement. Still for how
well studied it is I'd expect better agreement.

The cluster is also known as Caldwell 10 and is sometimes claimed to be
visible naked eye though its listed magnitude is 7.1. It is thought to
have formed in the Cassiopeia OB8 association. It has an unusual number
of Be stars. Also three blue stragglers have been found in it. These
are the result of stars merging, a rather rare event in open clusters.

This was taken back when I binned my color data which I don't do today.
Not because I didn't like the result be because it allows me to use
color data to augment luminance when conditions make that necessary. I
also took only half my color data. Something I still sometimes do with
bright open clusters like this one with no galaxies in the background.

A check of NED shows no galaxies listed. SIMBAD notes the Be stars I
mentioned but little else. Since they appear the same as other star,
maybe slightly less blue, I didn't bother to annotate them. It would
have made for a rather tightly packed image needing many lines pointing
to the various stars. Those interested can plate solve the image with
Astrometry.net and look them up in SIMBAD.

WEBDA indicates the cluster is rather significantly reddened by .78
magnitudes (that is almost exactly a factor of 2) which explains why the
many B stars are rather white rather than blue as you'd normally expect.
I see a lot of images on line with very blue stars or this cluster. I
can only surmise they pushed the blue to achieve that.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10'x2 RGB=1x10'x3, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Rick
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