NGC 2158

I had just moved to Pittsburgh, and I treated myself to a present, the Edmund Scientific 4" f/5 Astroscan.

A friend from work and I drove out to a very dark sky site at a golf course out in the country. We walked out a few hundred yards in the snow and set up on a camera tripod. Gemini was high in the sky, and I chose the great open cluster M35 for my 'first light'.

With perfect seeing and a very dark sky, the view was spectacular, and I switched from the low to medium power eyepiece and got a stunning view of this beautiful open cluster.

But right next to it I noticed something I had never seen before: a tiny little fuzzball, dim and at the limit of visibility. At first I thought it might be comet, but with the high power it resolved into a misty granularity: stars. It was another open cluster! Later I was to learn it was NGC 2158, a much more distant object, close enough to M35 to share the field of view.

Of course, I wasn't the first to have noticed it, but I certainly got the thrill of discovery, as if my eyes were the only ones to have ever seen it.

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific — and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Keats