NGC 2539 is an intermediate age open cluster located in the northern part of the Puppis constellation that was discovered by William Herschel on January 31, 1785.  Out of all the hundreds of stars in the cluster there is estimated to be at least one triple system (Mermiliod and Mayor, 1989).

I collected a total of 15 images of the cluster using the PROMPT-MO-1, Prompt5, and Prompt6 telescopes using the Skynet Robotic Telescope Network. The images taken using the B filter with an exposure time of 47.24 seconds, the V filter with exposure time of 23.62 seconds, and the R filter with and exposure time of 19.69 seconds. The following is an image created with the Afterglow program by using batch photometry on the gathered telescope images.

Using the aforementioned Afterglow program and Cluster Astromancer I found that it is located at RA of 122.67°and Dec of -12.84° or a Galactic Longitude of 53.73359° and a Galactic Latitude of 11.11331°. It also has a star count of 1525 stars, a mass of 72372 solar units, a physical radius of 14.530 ly, an angular radius of 0.2527090°, Proper motion RA of -2.29, Proper motion Dec of -0.43, a velocity dispersion of 0.5521108 mas/yr, distance of 1.01kpc, a log age of 8.95 years, a metallicity of -0.6, and an E(B-V) of 0.23.

Comparing these values to the values gathered by Karchenko et al(2013) and putting the values on a B – R vs R and a BP – RP vs RP plot gets these results.

(My plots on the left)

There is a very slight difference between the values which results insignificant differences between the plots.

Getting the cluster in Astromancer was fairly easy as it was obvious which stars were part of the cluster, or at least the very core of the cluster. Trying to find papers that mention this cluster was not that hard but finding ones that didn’t just mention it in passing was, and trying to decipher what they were talking about in them was even harder. I think that this course gave me enough knowledge to understand Astronomy but reading actual papers made me realize how much technical jargon and concepts in the field that are still very foreign and confusing to me.