- Mu-1 Scorpii (stars.astro.illinois.edu)
MU-1 SCO (Mu-1 Scorpii). In the crowded Milky Way the stars can fool you. In middle of the curve of Scorpius, the Scorpion, are two apparent naked-eye double stars, Zeta Sco and Mu Sco, both of which are made just of line-of-sight coincidences. The real fooler is Mu.
- Messier 48 (Wikipedia)
Messier 48 or M48, also known as NGC 2548, is an open cluster of stars in the equatorial constellation of Hydra. It sits near Hydra’s westernmost limit with Monoceros, about 18° 34′ to the east and slightly south of Hydra’s brightest star, Alphard. This grouping was discovered by Charles Messier in 1771, but there is no cluster precisely where Messier indicated; he made an error, as he did with M47. The value that he gave for the right ascension matches, however, his declination is off by five degrees. Credit for discovery is sometimes given instead to Caroline Herschel in 1783. Her nephew John Herschel described it as, “a superb cluster which fills the whole field; stars of 9th and 10th to the 13th magnitude – and none below, but the whole ground of the sky on which it stands is singularly dotted over with infinitely minute points”.
