- NGC 2527
NGC 2527 is a rather sparse open cluster in the southern constellation Puppis. It contains around 45 member stars scattered over an area around 10 arc-min across. Though fairly bright (visual magnitude 6.5), it gets lost in the background of Milky Way stars (it's the somewhat brighter, bluer collection of stars in the lower right quadrant of my image). Physically, it lies at a distance of around 1848 LY.
The region around Puppis contains numerous other open clusters. However, the interstellar dust is not very thick along our line of sight here, so several galaxies are also visible. If you look about half way between the cluster and the left edge of the image (a separation of 25.2 arc-min), you may be able to pick out the tiny, dim, brown-ish smudge that is the galaxy ESO430-201. Even more difficult to spot is the galaxy ESO494-026, around 0.5 degree to the NW of the cluster (toward the center of the image, about 1/5 of the way down from the top edge). In my image, only the stellar center is apparent, looking like a small, brown-ish star.
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