The night of August 19-20, 2020 I aimed my 8" SCT telescope towards the constellation Cassiopeia to find the open cluster M103. This open cluster was relatively bright in the 24mm eyepiece. During observing this open cluster I noticed it sort of reminded me a bit of the Pleiades, or even a little dipper with the patterns some of the stars formed. One of the important things when it comes to sketching the view through the eyepiece is it pays to look for patterns of stars to help place them better. Look for squares, triangles, lines, and so on, you'd be amazed how many stars form shapes when you're gazing at them through an eyepiece for an elongated amount of time.
M103 is around 10,000 light years from Earth, and takes up around 6 arc minutes of the sky which translates to a linear diameter of around 17.5 light years. M103 has an estimated age of around 25 million years old, and is one of the smallest and most remote open clusters containing 172 stars within the cluster. A large bright star known as Struve 131 at a magnitude of 7 is a multiple star system which dominates the open cluster, but isn't actually part of the open cluster and is much closer to Earth.
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| M103 Open Cluster in Cassiopeia |
This sketch was done on black canson paper, and the stars were placed using a white charcoal pencil. Also used a kneaded eraser to dim the stars in the field of view for a more realistic look and brightness to the overall cluster. This became one of my favorite open clusters while doing this sketch.
If you would like to see where this object is located in the night sky along with a time lapse of me sketching this object be sure to check out the video below:
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