NGC 188 (also known as Caldwell 1) is an

open cluster An open cluster is a type of star cluster made of up to a few thousand stars that were formed from the same giant molecular cloud and have roughly the same age. More than 1,100 open clusters have been discovered within the Milky Way galaxy, and ...

in the constellation Cepheus. It was discovered by

John Herschel Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet (; 7 March 1792 – 11 May 1871) was an English polymath active as a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, inventor, experimental photographer who invented the blueprint and did botanical wor ...

in 1825. Unlike most open clusters that drift apart after a few million years because of the gravitational interaction of our

Milky Way The Milky Way is the galaxy that includes our Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye ...

galaxy, NGC 188 lies far above the plane of the galaxy and is one of the most ancient of open clusters known, at approximately 6.8 billion years old. NGC 188 is very close to the North Celestial Pole, under five degrees away, and in the constellation of Cepheus at an estimated 5,000

light-year A light-year, alternatively spelled light year, is a large unit of length used to express astronomical distances and is equivalent to about 9.46 trillion kilometers (), or 5.88 trillion miles ().One trillion here is taken to be 1012 ...

s' distance, this puts it slightly above the Milky Way's disc and further from the center of the galaxy than the Sun.

References

External links

*
NGC 188
at SEDS NGC objects pages
NGC 188
at NightSkyInfo.com * * {{DEFAULTSORT:NGC 0188 NGC 0188 NGC 0188 0188 001b Astronomical objects discovered in 1825