NGC 1758: Open Star Cluster (Taurus) RA: 05h 04.5m / DEC: +23° 48'.8 Instrument: 10-inch Starfinder |
This is an interesting deep-sky puzzle. MegaStar plots NGC 1758 as overlapping NGC 1746 to an astonishing degree. Both are about 40' in size with 20 members, according to Lynga. However, the view in the 10-inch offers little to support those statistics. The sketch at left presents a 36X view, which covers roughly a 1.5-degree swatch of sky. Four bright 7th magnitude stars anchor the eastern half of the drawing. These frame a moderately dense star field, which is identified as NGC 1758 by the folks at the NGC/IC Project. Twenty stars are clustered in this part of the sky in my drawing. According to the NGC/IC Project, NGC 1750 lies a few arc minutes to the west of NGC 1758. Few member stars, if any, are recorded in my sketch. Finally, the NGC/IC project reluctantly identifies NGC 1746 as a small gathering of faint stars between GSC 1845:1228 and GSC 1845:2033. The 10-inch does not reveal any "members" of this cluster. You can see for yourself by pointing your scope about 2 degrees north of 4.6 magnitude Iota (102) Tauri. |
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