A Break From The Herschels

On the evening of February 5, I wasn't able to see any Herschel objects I would like to image. And, it would appear, there may be quite a few I won't be able to image because they will be too low in the sky and blocked by trees. We'll see. However, I wanted to continue imaging the Messier catalog, so I found, and imaged 5 more objects.

M36

This is Messier 36 (M36) in the consellation of Auriga. This is also the only image made in color that night, which is part of the reason why I'm putting it here. Looking closely, you can see that the stars are blue. Blue stars are hotter than average and usually younger. The stars in M36 are estimated to be about 25 million years old. Compare that to the age of our sun, which is in the range of 4.6 billion years old. The cluster is about 4000 light years from us. It is estimated that these stars may share many similarities with a close by cluster that is easy to spot, the Pleiades.