Quote:
Originally Posted by ngcles
Hi All,
I'm going to add another obscure one.
ESO 92-18 is an obscure open cluster in Carina. I was alerted to its existence by Timo Karhula via the AMASTRO mailing list a few days ago and it looks an interesting target. Its location is RA 10 14 57.3 and Dec -64 36 30. It is almost exactly 3 degrees virtually due west of Theta Carinae.
As Timo said on AMASTRO, on the Aladin previewer in SIMBAD in appearance it looks a bit like a globular cluster. It is in fact an aged, low-metallicity but very populous open cluster about 4-5gyr old that is about 9.5kpc distant (31kly). With a 10" 'scope he reports: with 150x magnification, I saw a faint but pretty large patch of light. With averted vision, I could glimpse some stars over it.
These are foreground stars overlaying the cluster it would seem -- the brightest true cluster members are around the mag 15.5 mark.
There is an interesting paper here
http://astrobib.u-strasbg.fr:2008/cg...J....111..820K
Don't expect it to be glaring out of the eyepiece and I don't think you'll find it plotted on the popular atlases or software -- make your own finder-chart!
Best,
Les D |
Interesting Les, look forward to what people will make of it. Attached is an image generated in Aladin - what surprised me is the size after the description of "a pretty large patch of light". It's not much more than an arcminute in diameter!
Cheers -