Astr110 Photography Projects, Fall 2004

M37, Jason Bremer and Josh Holwerda

M37 is a open cluster which are usually held together by mutual gravitational attraction. They are believed to originate from large cosmic gas and dust clouds in the Milky Way, and to continue to orbit the galaxy through the disk. M37 is one of three galactic star clusters in the Constellation Auriga. M37 is also the richest of the three, containing about 150 stars brighter than mag 12.5, and perhaps a total of over 500 stars. Also, at least the majority of these stars are in fact red giants and that the hottest main sequence star is of spectral type B9V. It is estimated that M37 is over 200-300 million years old and has a distance of 4,600 light years.

Because M37 is a open cluster this means that there are hundreds of stars within its parameters. This then means that various types of stars are orbiting within the gravitational attraction. Within this photo we can see a numerous amounts of red giants. The picture was taken on November 30, 2004 at Calvin's robotic telescope in the New Mexico. For this image we combined multiple filter images. We adjusted for brightness and color. After this was completed, we aligned and then combined our filter images into one completed image. The completed image was then cropped and resized into the picture you see above.

References:
Web site: www.seds.org/messier/open.html

Web site: www.intercom.net/user/shaffer/messier/m37.hml