Page 26 - Astronomy Book 1

Now the stars that form larger clusters within our galaxy

The stars we see in the sky are our nearest neighbouring suns. They are all part of our galaxy of some 200 billion stars but as we are
in the middle of one of the galaxy arms they appear all around us at relatively fixed positions in the sky.

Amongst these individual stars are denser congromerations or clusters of all shapes, densities, sizes and star colours. If we look at a
section of sky in the constelation of Pupis (below) we can see how the cluster density and star colour varies. The two more
concentrated regions in the top half of the image are called M46 and M47.

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