IYA Live Telescope Today – IC 2602: “The Southern Pleiades”

On April 4, 2009 the IYA Live Telescope was busy broadcasting from the Southern Galactic Telescope Hosting facility and fulfilling your “100 Hours of Astronomy” requests. Are you ready to take a look at the video that came from the adventure and to add it to our library? Then come along as we view Jon Hanford’s suggestion of IC 2602: “The Southern Plieades”…

The following factual information is a cut and paste from Wikipedia:

IC 2602 – “The Southern Pleiades”: Constellation – CARINA

IC 2602 (also known as the Theta Carinae Cluster or Southern Pleiades) is an open cluster in the constellation Carina. It was discovered by Abbe Lacaille in 1751 from South Africa. The cluster is at a distance of about 479 light-years away from Earth and can be seen with the naked eye.


The Southern Pleiades (IC 2602) has an overall apparent magnitude of 1.9, which is 70% fainter than the Taurean Pleiades, and contains about 60 stars. Theta Carinae, the brightest star within the open cluster, is a third-magnitude star with an apparent magnitude of +2.74. All the other stars within the cluster are of the fifth magnitude and fainter. Like its northern counterpart in Taurus, the Southern Pleiades spans a sizeable area of sky, approximately 50 arcminutes, so it is best viewed with large binoculars or telescope with a wide-angle eyepiece. The cluster is thought to have the same age as the open cluster IC 2391, which has a lithium depletion boundary age of 50 million years old.

We would very much like to thank Jon Hanford for his request of IC 2602 and we hope you like the view! As always, you can visit the remote telescope by clicking on the IYA “LIVE Remote Cam” Logo to your right. We’ll be broadcasting whenever skies are clear and dark in Central Victoria! Enjoy…

(Information Source: Wikipedia)

2 Replies to “IYA Live Telescope Today – IC 2602: “The Southern Pleiades””

  1. hey! the information is awesome!

    i think it’s great that our UT readers are working hard to make their decisions on what they’d like to see in our remote telescope. it certainly is fun to look at photographs and even more fun when you can chart out the ones that you’d like to aim a telescope at that perhaps you’d never seen before!

    for anyone else that would like to add a request, don’t stop! we’re still going strong at our 100 hours of telescope time. just put in what you’d like for us to aim the telescope as a post here on UT at:

    IYA Live Telescope – UT Reader Requests. thank you!!

  2. Forth best southern open cluster in the sky.
    The Jewel Box (NGC 4755), NGC 2516 in Carina (already imaged in this series) is IMO 2nd, NGC 3532 in Carina “The Football Cluster” third, then IC 2601 4th, and fifth probably goes to NGC 3293.
    A good selection of Open Clusters can be found at Andrew James’ Homepage at; http://homepage.mac.com/andjames/Page03010.htm

    *I do thank Andrew James for pointing this useful list of 100 bright open clusters (50 north/ 50 south) a that may be useful for visual observers

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