APOD 3.4

This picture "Star Cluster M34" caught my eye as I was browsing through the APOD articles for several reasons. The picture itself is very interesting, with its depiction of a very dark night sky, encrusted with diamond-like stars and so incredibly radiant and bright, that I very much wish I could go to some place with almost no light pollution to see the sky in its clear and unadulterated form. The picture also depicts an aspect of a constellation that we as a class have studied, and I have witnessed up in the sky. This is the constellation Perseus, or more specifically, the picture depicts the M object that is found in the constellation, M34. While reading through the article and relevant links, I learned a few things about this object in the sky. Firstly, that the stars found in M34 are rather young astronomically speaking, being only 200 million years old. I also learned that most open star clusters share one very similar trait at least, which is the fact that over time, the stars found within the cluster will drift apart due to gravitational tides and interactions with the Milky Way's interstellar dust and other stars.