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Asterism Picot 1



Because of its shape, the asterism “Picot 1” is often called “Napoeleon's Hat”. It is located only 40 arcminutes south of Arcturus, the brightest star in the constellation of Bootes. At a low magnification, a short swing to the south is enough and the asterism with its striking shape should already be in the field of view.

The fact that this is not an open star cluster, but an asterism in which the stars just happen to be in the same direction, can easily be understood by the very different distances of the respective stars, that extends from 175 to 2,800 light-years. The apparent magnitudes vary from 9.4mag to 10.6mag. The brightest star is also the most distant - this indicates a high absolute brightness, which in this case is M= -0.3mag. This makes this particular star around 110 times brighter than our sun.

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The asterism is great to look at in my 20” f/3 telescope. The stars appear quite bright and form a very memorable pattern. “Picot 1” appears most beautiful at a low magnification of 120x.

At a much higher magnification of 380x, I was able to see three very faint galaxies, all of which have a redshift of z=0.055, which corresponds to a distance of around 750 million light-years. At magnitudes of 15.5-16mag, the galaxies are quite faint, but were easy to observe with indirect vision and could be held for a longer period of time without any problems.



Der Asterismus Picot 1 im 20 Zoll Dobson- Teleskop (Spiegelteleskop)