M35
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M35 |
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Deep Sky Object Chart
| Stars in Gemini
| M35
| Eskimo
The brightest of the individual stars reach magnitude 7, but there are countless fainter ones which fill a telescope's field of vision, and indeed spill past the edges of the scene. Bright as it is, this star cluster was known from the very early days of telescopic astronomy; although the "M35" designation dates to 1764, when Charles Messier entered it into his catalog of celestial treats, the cluster seems to have been seen a decade earlier at least. Located approximately 2200 light years from us, M35 spans 30 light years. To an inhabitant of a world located inside the cluster, the view would in some ways be less impressive; the cluster's stars would be brilliant, of course - but they would also be spread out over the entire sky. In fact, there would be little sense of being inside a cluster at all. This is not just speculation. Earth is quite near several clusters, and partly inside one scattered group - the "big dipper" asterism is the core of one of these. M35 and other such groups are best appreciated from a suitable distance, where they can be seen as the family they truly are. A bonus for amateurs with larger telescopes is the presence of another, much more distant star cluster just to one side of M35: NGC 2158, an 11th magnitude collection which looks more like the ball-shaped swarms called "globular" star clusters than the open cluster studies suggest it is. NGC 2158 is a dim roundish glow in moderate telescopes (6-8 inches of aperture), and is only fully revealed in photographs or digital images. NGC 2158, although seemingly intertwined among the outlying stars of M35, is actually six times as distant, perhaps 16,000 light years, at the very outer rim of our galactic spiral.
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