vir prudens non contra ventum mingit

Two post sabbatical for the format. Mr Numerus Six - you got the job! Coolness. Except for the commute - mind you, if you had to drive a Honda Jazz without an mp3 player, then you would have major grounds for complaint. A dig rad apps dude eh? Anything to get out of actually taking x-rays I see :-) Q: Name a famous dude born at Lennep in the Lower Rhine Province of Germany (hint: wasn't a member of the Adams Family).

Jewel Box
NGC 4755, aka Kappa Crucis cluster and Jewel Box, this open cluster is composed of over a hundred stars, about fifty of which are a mixture of colourful supergiants: reds and blues intermingled with yellows and whites in a profusion of sparkling light. The cluster is just a baby, perhaps no older than ten million years. Many of the stars have very high luminosities, approaching 100,000 Suns. The central star is kappa Crucis, a blue sixth-magnitude supergiant. The cluster is considered to be from 6800 to 7800 light years away.


Eagle Nebula (M16)
NGC 6611, aka Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. This conspicuous region of active star formation, situated in Serpens Cauda is an emission nebula (IC 4703) within which is an open star cluster (NGC 6611). The discoverer, Philippe Loys de Chéseaux, describes only the cluster when recording his 1745-1746 discovery. Charles Messier, on his independent rediscovery of June 3, 1764, mentions that these stars appeared "enmeshed in a faint glow", probably suggestions of the nebula. It lies some 7,000 light years distant in the constellation Serpens, close to the borders to Scutum and Sagittarius, and in the next inner spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy.


M5
NGC 5904 (M5) is a globular cluster first seen by Gottfried Kirch and his wife Maria Margarethe on May 5, 1702, when they observed a comet, and described as a "nebulous star". Charles Messier found it independently on May 23, 1764, and described it as a round nebula which "doesn't contain any stars". William Herschel was the first to resolve this cluster into stars; he counted 200 of them with his 40-foot (48 inch aperture) reflector in 1791, "although the middle is so compressed that it is impossible to distinguish the components." M5 is thought to be one of the oldest globular clusters, with a computed age of 13 billion years. Its diameter is about 165 light years, making it one of the larger globular clusters. At its distance of 24,500 light years, this diameter is about 23 minutes of arc.


Galaxy Cluster in Virgo
This rather poor image (taken too close to dusk due to my lack of patience...) is part of the giant agglomeration of galaxies, the nearest big cluster of galaxies that are the largest proven structure in our intergalactic neighborhood, and the most remote cosmic objects with a physical connection to our own small group of galaxies, the Local Group, including our Milky Way galaxy. This structure is another discovery by Charles Messier, who noted behind his entry for M91:
"The constellation Virgo and especially the northern wing is one of the constellations which encloses the most nebulae. This catalog contains 13 which have been determined, viz. Nos. 49, 58, 59, 60, 61, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90 and 91. All these nebulae appear to be without stars and can be seen only in a good sky and near meridian passage. Most of these nebulae have been pointed out to me by M. Méchain."
Like nebula - only different.