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Details:
Mars closes in on the Beehive open cluster, M44 in Cancer. Sunday morning in the pre-dawn hours it will be dead-center. I had hoped to photograph it then, but it's raining here all weekend long. Labeled and unlabeled photos.
In the labeled photo the stars gamma, delta, eta, and theta mark Cancer the Crab's carapace. epsilon is one of the few stars inside an open cluster assigned a Greek letter.
The two circumflexes near the center point to 2 faint 15th-magnitude NGC galaxies, 2624 and 2625, contained inside the boundaries of the cluster. There are 2 other NGC's I didn't mark plus some galaxies from other catalogs. Are there other open clusters with galaxies lying hidden within them?
Photo data:
Panasonic G9, Lumix 100-300mm lens @ 200mm, Sky-Watcher GTi
... 31 x (f/4.9, 60 sec, ISO 1600) = 31 min
... N up W right, FOV = 4.9° x 3.7°
... date: Oct 9, 2026 4:30am MDT (= 10:30 UT)
Photographer's website:
No URL provided.
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