Caldwell 71 (NGC 2477)

[Christopher K.]

This Tuesday night during free-time observing Mike Carambat encouraged the rest of us to look at NGC 2477 while he had it in the eyepiece. I'm glad he did; it was almost as if fine blue particulate matter had been tossed onto the glass. Everywhere I aimed my eye, fine blue specks glowed in my peripheral vision.

In the constellation Puppis, it contains over 300 stars in a 20-arcminute field. It's probably not in the Messier catalog due to its low altitude for Northern hemisphere observers. Burham calls it "probably the finest of the galactic clusters in Puppis". That's saying something, as he has twenty-five listed.

Interestingly, it looks at though NGC 2477 has never been an APOD.

More information:
http://seds.org/messier/xtra/ngc/n2477.html
Burnam's Celestial Handbook, p. 1516.

[Christopher K.]

It's been a while since HRPO has pursued this beauty. If it's up before midnight in March it is probably available in December before midnight.

The ESO got a nice image in the spring of 2013...
https://astropix.ipac.caltech.edu/image ... z-ngc_2477