Telescope Reviews:

Poster:

cildarith (see all of this user's photos)

Description:

Collinder 399 (The Coathanger; Brocchi's Cluster): This delightful group of 5th-7th magnitude stars in the shape of an old-fashioned coat hanger is best seen in binoculars or the finder scope, but I can almost fit the entire thing into the 104' field of view of my 30mm Plössl. This object was observed by the Arabic astronomer al-Sufi as "a little cloud" more than 600 years before the invention of the telescope (Strong & Sinnott, 2000). Robert Burnham, Jr. likened this cluster to a snail (Burnham. 1978) rather than a coat hanger. What do you think? Sadly recent evaluation of data from the ESA's Hipparcos satellite has revealed that the stars of Brocchi's Cluster are not physically related (Skiff, 1998). It is still, however, worth a look in binoculars and your lowest power eyepiece.