Canon 350D Hap Griffin Baader Mod
9x180sec at iso 1600
30 Darks/Flats/Bias
Celestron 9.25 reduced 0.63

Messier 67 (M67, NGC 2682) is one of the oldest known open clusters, and by far the oldest of Messier's open clusters, being aged at 3.2 billion years.
Only few known open clusters were found to be older, among them probably NGC 188 at about 5 billion years, longly quoted as the oldest known cluster, and NGC 6791, which is about 7 billion years old (according to Götz), and is currently the oldest known open cluster in our Milky Way galaxy.

As M67 is of an age of the same order of magnitude as our Solar System, and its stars happen to have a similar chemical composition as the Sun.

April 5, 2008