- Anacortes — Thumbnail History (historylink.org)
The City of Anacortes is located in Skagit County on the northern end of Fidalgo Island in Puget Sound. It is the only incorporated community on Fidalgo, which is separated from the mainland by the Swinomish Channel. Highway bridges link Anacortes to the mainland and to Whidbey Island to the south. Samish and other Northern Straits Salish peoples have inhabited the land in and around Anacortes for thousands of years. Permanent non-Indian settlement began in the 1860s. Anacortes was incorporated in 1891 with an economy based on lumber, fishing and fish processing, and farming. These industries thrived for many years before facing decline in the mid-twentieth century. Several oil companies selected Anacortes for refineries in the 1950s. Refining, tourism, residential and retirement housing, and commercial retail have come to dominate the local economy.
- Open cluster (Wikipedia)
An open cluster is a type of star cluster made of tens to a few thousand stars that were formed from the same giant molecular cloud and have roughly the same age. More than 1,100 open clusters have been discovered within the Milky Way galaxy, and many more are thought to exist. Each one is loosely bound by mutual gravitational attraction and becomes disrupted by close encounters with other clusters and clouds of gas as they orbit the Galactic Center. This can result in a loss of cluster members through internal close encounters and a dispersion into the main body of the galaxy. Open clusters generally survive for a few hundred million years, with the most massive ones surviving for a few billion years. In contrast, the more massive globular clusters of stars exert a stronger gravitational attraction on their members, and can survive for longer. Open clusters have been found only in spiral and irregular galaxies, in which active star formation is occurring.