The Caldwell Objects

ters it has had thus far
with the galactic center.
Only the concentrated
clusters like NGC 362 can
survive repeated closerange
encounters with our
galactic bulge. A looser
cluster would have been
ripped apart by tidal
forces, its members tossed
helter-skelter into the
galactic halo. Presently
NGC 362 is approaching
us at 220 km per second
and is 30,000 light-years
from the galactic center, so
we are not witnessing one
of its close encounters
with the galactic bulge,
nor will we in our
lifetimes.
In photographs taken with large telescopes it is
difficult to appreciate NGC 362's dense core
because it is usually overexposed. The cluster's
faint outliers appear to be fizzing off that burnedout
ball like gas bubbles from an Alka-Seltzer
tablet in water. The only way to truly appreciate
the cluster's dynamic beauty is to go out and see
it through the eyepiece of a telescope. My view of
NGC 362, from Wellington, New Zealand, was
spectacular. I used an 8-inch Celestron Schmidt-
Cassegrain telescope that Rob and Lesley Hall
had set up for me in their Wellington backyard. I
almost didn't get to see NGC 362. New Zealand is
noted for its clouds, and my Caldwell-hunting
trip was nearly at an end. In fact, I was returning
to Hawaii the next morning. But I still hadn't
studied this cluster in any detail. Fortunately, the
sky cleared in the wee hours of the morning, just
hours before my flight. Rob woke me up,
104 & 106
pointed to the sky, and I was outside in a flash.
The Small Magellanic Cloud is dimly visible to
the naked eye even from Wellington. I had no
trouble spotting the cluster in the telescope's
finder. I simply directed it 1½° due north of NGC
346 and voilá! At low power, the cluster
displayed a perfectly round sphere of stars
packed into a tight ball that became increasingly
denser toward the center, until it burned with
what appeared to be the light of a single intense
star. NGC 362 has a relatively faint horizontalbranch
magnitude of 15.4, so it is not easily
resolved even with the 8-inch. I saw a suggestion
of resolution toward the center, but no more.
Trying to resolve stars in the cluster's outer halo
was like trying to track a piece of dust in a
sunbeam; it's all but impossible from a suburban
site with a moderately sized telescope. But I bet if
I had had the time, I could have eked out more
and more of the
The Caldwell Objects 411