This line of colorful stars appears to tumble into the small open cluster NGC 1502.
Kemble’s Cascade was recognized by the Canadian amateur astronomer Lucien Kemble in 1980 as a beautiful chain of stars in Camelopardalis. Credit: Michael Israel
In the world of deep-sky observing, we think of major classes of objects: star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies. But once in a while an exception to this classification arises as a favorite object for observers. Back in 1980, the great Walter Scott Houston wrote one of his celebrated columns in Sky & Telescope and addressed an intriguing line of stars in Camelopardalis. He named the feature Kemble’s Cascade, after Canadian observer Lucian Kemble, who observed this line of stars and reported on it.
Both Houston and Kemble were really nice guys, and lots of fun to talk with. I’m featuring the association of stars named after Kemble as today’s object. The asterism lies in a stark region of sky but terminates on one end with the small open cluster NGC 1502.
What makes Kemble’s Cascade alluring is that it consists of a chain of more than 20 stars of magnitudes 5 to 10, and many of them are colorful, ranging from slightly bluish to several orange-tinted suns.
Kemble, a Franciscan friar, originally wrote that this group is “a beautiful cascade of faint stars tumbling from the northwest down to the open cluster NGC 1502.”
NGC 1502, a true cluster, holds 60 stars, is about 5 million years old, and spans 9.7’. It glows at magnitude 6.0 and lies 3,500 light-years away.
