We stay with the picture theme from last week and look at an image of the young cluster NGC7129. This one is taken with the 1m telescopes from the LCO, and has 3x60s exposures in V, R, and I added up. While our HOYS-LCO project isn’t using these telescopes, we will teach pupils how to make such colour images. Thus, as a reminder: If you know of any schools or teachers that might be interested in taking part, please make them aware of it. The application process is quite simple.
We investigated this cluster in one of our last papers, and found that it has a distance of 910+-4pc. It also contains one of our favourite objects, the variable star V350Cep. We only recently looked at it and how it shows long term dimming events. If you want to find it in the image: Go to the top of the image, ‘above’ the cluster. There are three quite bright stars aligned from the top to the bottom right, at an angle of about 45 degrees. The two at the bottom right have some nebulosity around them and the middle of the three has a faint red companion. Go to the top of these three stars. More or less directly to the bottom left of that you find a slightly less bright, yellow-ish star. That is V350Cep. Doesn’t look very interesting – but certainly is 🙂 .