Saurer 1 - Open Star Cluster
At a distance of just under 43,000 light-years, this open star cluster is located very far away from Earth in the constellation "Canis Minor".
It lies 8° above the galactic plane and can therefore be studied and observed quite well without disturbing dust clouds.
The stars are very faint due to the great distance. Only a few are in the 16mag range, most are 17mag and fainter. The cluster appears very
small in the sky with an apparent size of only 1.3', but the true diameter is still 16 light-years.
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Saurer 1 is a very difficult object in my 20" Dobsonian and requires a very dark sky. At both 120x and 210x, nothing was visible of the cluster.
Only at V=270x an extremely faint patch of light did emerge from the background with averted vision, which could hardly be held.
A few extremely faint individual stars were also visible, but these were at the edge and probably did not belong to the cluster itself.
