#8: MESSIER 35 – A SUPURB STAR CLUSTER!

Soaring high in the east – almost to a point directly overhead – are the Gemini Twins, Pollux and Castor. They appear in the sky as two matchstick men holding hands.

During this winter of 2004, Saturn happens to be residing right in the middle of this constellation, like a brilliant yellowish-white "star." Henry Neeley (1879-1963), who was a popular lecturer at New York’s Hayden Planetarium during the 1940s and ‘50s would often refer to the "long wedge" of Gemini, composed of the stars Pollux and Castor (the heads of the Twins) and Alhena which marks one of Pollux’s feet. If you have binoculars, it is worthwhile to sweep the region of the sky from Alhena and points west to around the fainter stars Meboula and Propus.

Just above and to the right of Propus lies number 35 in Charles Messier’s catalogue. Located just off the trailing foot of Castor, M35 can just be seen with the unaided eye on dark transparent nights. In low-power binoculars it may look like a dim, fairly large unresolved interstellar cloud, but look again.

Even through light-polluted suburban skies, 7x glasses reveal at least a half dozen of the cluster’s brightest stars against the whitish glow of about 200 fainter ones. M35 has been described as a "splendid specimen" whose stars appear in curving rows, reminding one of the bursting of a skyrocket.

Walter Scott Houston (1912-1993) who wrote the Deep-Sky Wonders column in Sky & Telescope magazine for nearly half a century called M35: " . . . one of the greatest objects in the heavens. A superb object that appears as big as the Moon and fills the eyepiece with a glitter of bright stars from center to edge."

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