Observation and Investigation of NGC 1662 (Abstract)

Volume 48 number 2 (2020)

Talia Green

Stanford Online High School, Academy Hall Floor 2 8853, 415 Broadway, Redwood City, CA 94063; tgreen@ma.org

Sebastian Dehnadi

Stanford Online High School, Academy Hall Floor 2 8853, 415 Broadway, Redwood City, CA 94063; sebastian@dehnadi.com

Connor Espenshade

Stanford Online High School, Academy Hall Floor 2 8853, 415 Broadway, Redwood City, CA 94063; cjespenshade@icloud.com

Kalée Tock

Stanford Online High School, Academy Hall Floor 2 8853, 415 Broadway, Redwood City, CA 94063; kaleeg@stanford.edu

Abstract

(Abstract only) We observed and investigated the open cluster NGC 1662. Images of NGC 1662 were requested in multiple filters from the Las Cumbres Observatory and reduced using aperture photometry from the Our Solar Siblings Pipeline. We queried the stars’ proper motions and parallaxes from Gaia Data Release 2 to ascertain cluster membership, and looked up their APASS catalog magnitudes. Using the ADU counts of the stars in our images, we calibrated the blue and visual counts of NGC 1662’s stars relative to reference stars. These calibrated magnitudes were used to create a Color Magnitude Diagram (CMD) consisting of the visual magnitudes on the vertical axis and the difference between the blue and visual magnitudes on the horizontal axis. The bluest star in the cluster was in the Type A spectral class, implying that any hotter stars with shorter lifespans had already died. Based on the life span of A type stars, we determined that the open cluster NGC 1662 is less than 400 million years old, which confirms the findings of a previous study of this cluster.