The sky around IC 348 at true scale, north up and east left, with stars to magnitude 8. The circles show the field of a low-power eyepiece and of 10×50 binoculars.
IC 348 is an open cluster in Perseus, 1,020 light-years away
IC 348 (LBN 758, vdB 19) is an open cluster in the constellation Perseus, 1,020 light-years away. It shines at magnitude 7.3 and spans 7′ of sky, about 2.1 light-years across. It is best in a small telescope, 4 to 6 inches, and it is highest in the evening sky in January.
Open cluster: a loose group of a few dozen to a few thousand young stars born together from one cloud of gas. They drift apart over a few hundred million years and lie in the disk of the Milky Way.
IC 348 is vdB 19 in the Van den Bergh catalog of reflection nebulae
Sidney van den Bergh listed it in his catalog of reflection nebulae (1966), drawn from the Palomar Sky Survey. He chose nebulae lit by a star bright enough to appear in the Bonner and Cordoba star catalogs. The star that lights it is HD 281159, B5V, magnitude 8.5. He rated it bright in brightness and blue in color.
Finding IC 348 from ζ Per
IC 348 lies 2.0° west of ζ Per, the magnitude 2.8 star. That is within one binocular field.
IC 348 is highest in the evening in January
The chart gives its height above the horizon at 9 pm through the year, from 60°N to 40°S. It can be seen from the whole northern hemisphere and south to about 58°S, and never sets north of 58°N.
IC 348 is 1,020 light-years away
The light seen from IC 348 tonight left it about 1,020 years ago, around 1006 AD. It ranks 5 of 78 by distance among the star clusters on Go Astronomy. Distance source: Gaia DR3, Hunt and Reffert 2023.
