Astr110 Photography Projects, Fall 2005

Stars Near Kemble's Cascade, Kara Dauphin

Kemble's Cascade was best defined by its founder as “a beautiful cascade of faint stars tumbling from the northwest down to the open cluster NGC 1502." Father Lucian J. Kemble, a Canadian monk, first discovered this chain of stars in 1980. Located near the constellation Camelopardalis, Kemble's Cascade is comprised of 15 to 25 stars, ranging in magnitude from five to ten. Kemble's Cascade is considered an "asterism of stars" and not a true open cluster as is sometimes thought. "This "cascade" is unique in that it is considered a random clustering of stars that form a chain only from our position in the Milky Way. Kemble's Cascade appears to be about five times the width of the moon. Because of the stars' varying distances, its linear size cannot be determined.

Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties, the above photograph is not actually of Kemble's Cascade, but of nearby stars. However, this group of stars vividly displays variation in color among stars. These colors are a result of different surface temperatures. Stars range from cooler red stars, having a temperature around 3,000K, to hotter blue stars, whose temperatures can reach over 30,000K.

References:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap000814.html

http://www.backyard-astro.com/deepsky/bino/01_b.html

http://www.jupiter-jp.net/~ike/English/description/Kemble's%20Cascade.htm

The Cosmic Perspective, 3rd edition, Jeffrey Bennett, Megan Donahue, Nicholas Schneider, & Mark Voit