- Kemble 1 Kemble's Cascade
Kemble 1 is a string of fairly bright stars lying outside the Milky Way stream in the constellation Camelopardalis. This asterism was first described by the amateur Canadian astronomer Lucian Kemble, who stumbled across it while observing the sky with binoculars. He descriubed it as a "beautiful cascade of faint stars." Walter Scott Houston published Kemble's description in his "Deep Sky Wonders" article in December of 1980. Houston refered to the asterism as "Kemble's Cascade", and the name stuck.
Kemble 1 contains 16 to 19 stars (depending on which ones you choose to include) starting in the lower left corner of my image near the true open cluster NGC 1502. It then runs diagonally upward toward the upper right corner of the image. It is anchored near the center by the magnitude 4.95 blue-white star HD 24479. This is the brightest star in the asterism, with the others ranging from 7th to 9th magnitude. Two additional bright stars along the right edge of my image, the blue-while magnitude 5.82 HD 23523 and the yellow-white magnitude 4.78 HD 23089, are not part of the asterism. While Kemble's Cascade is just a chance alignment of stars lying at various distances from the Earth, it is a beautiful sight in binoculars or a small telescope.
While not part of Kemble 1, NGC 1502 is itself a nice target in a larger telescope. It contains around 45 stars packed into an area about 20 arc-min across. It has an apparent magnitude of 6.9 and lies at a distance of 2700 LY. The brighest component in the cluster is the close optical double HD 25638 and HD 25639, which often appears as one bright "star" in low-magnification images such as mine. HD 25639 is a magnitude 7.08 class B giant. HD 25638 (also designated SZ Camelopardalis) is an eclipsing binary with an average combined magnitude of 6.96. NGC 1502 was discovered by William Herschel in November of 1787.
This mosaiced image of Kemble's Cascade was created from 5 images— one of the center of the asterism and the other four forming the corners around it. Each of the five images was created from 16 90-second exposures. This mosaicing was necessay because the asterism is too large (around 2.5 degrees in length) to be adequately captured in a single image using the current SOCO system.
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