The Star Cluster NGC 2168 (also known as Messier 35), is an open cluster of stars in the west of the Gemini constellation. The cluster was discovered in 1745 by Jean-Philippe de Cheseaux who was a Swiss astronomer and in 1750 it was independently discovered by John Bevis who was also an English astronomer. The star cluster is 2,970 lightyears from us. NGC 2168 contains about 500 stars and its age is about 100 million years old. A detailed study occurred towards this star cluster, and many astronomers worked and analyzed the star cluster itself, The astronomers were Charles Messier, William Herschel, and John Herschel. This analysis gave us a piece of certain information about the star cluster such as the distance, age, and the properties and distribution of this star cluster in our galaxy.
By Studying this star cluster, I learned many things about it, and it involved looking closely at different groups of stars, understanding how they are born, how they move, and how they change over time. I had to go into more detail to analyze and understand this star cluster more, I collected 15 images on Skynet, an astronomer tool that helped to capture different images with different filters, the telescopes that I used were mostly PROMPT-MO-1, PROMPT-USASK, Prompt5 and Prompt6. I also made sure that the exposure times were carefully adjusted and they were: 56.45s for the B filter, 19.35s for the V filter, and lastly 32.26s for the R filter, all these procedures led me to get the clearest images to complete my analysis.
After receiving the images that I wanted, I used Afterglow also an astronomer tool to make sure that I aligned and stacked all the images that were given to me and used the photometer option, to get certain data points and measurements that had to be recorded and in order to move to the next step. After the afterglow process, a CSV with different values was provided for me and then I had to use another tool which is called Clustermancer. In the Clustermancer tool, i used different options to make sure I got certain data points and images with the Field Star Removal option which removes all the field stars and keeps only the star clusters. I also used the Archive Fetching option to retrieve the data that I had collected earlier and update the clustermancer by doing the changes that I optimized for. Later I created a certain graph that contained the following filters such as RP vs BP-RP in the Isochrone matching. Here is a picture of the graph that I made with the filter itself:
I also had to create a certain image with all the combined color images of NGC 2168, This picture down below includes the tri-color cluster with a re-reddening value E(B-V) of 0.25. The Values for estimated proper motion in RA and Dec, distance, Log(Age) AND age in years,
metallicity, and E(B-V) for NGC 2168: RA: 92.29, Dec: 24.35, Log_age: 7.5, Metallicity: -0.7.
The analysis helped to analyse and observe the star cluster but also to make sure to discover different values and parameters, such as the mass the radius, distance, metallicity, log_age and etc. as you can see above with the provided values. During my research, i also discovered other information that were not related to my analysis but were search out of curiosity. I learned that the it has an apparent magnitude of 5.3, it has a sky declination of +24 degrees 20 and a right ascension of 06 08m 54.0s.
I also became aware of some fascinating cluster stars that are called blue stragglers who are young stars and those stars defies the age between them.
Looking back, the experience and the research was phenomenal, I’m so happy that i chose to do this analysis and increased my knowledge about them. I learned many many things about our milky way, how star clusters evolve over time, how they look like because i haven’t seen a star cluster from an actual telescope before. In the end, this whole experience made me see the universe in a new way and I’m really glad I got to learn so much from it.
Here is the link for the Astronomicon for the star cluster NGC 2168.
Astronomicon
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