Open cluster M48 in Hydra, as photographed with the Burrell Schmidt telescope of Case Western Reserve University's Warner and Swasey Observatory located on Kitt Peak, near Tucson, Arizona. This approximately true-color picture was created from twelve images taken in January 1997 using BVR colors. Image size is 40.6 arc minutes.

M48 contains close to a hundred stars spread out over a large region of the sky, but can still be identified with the naked eye when observing conditions are good. About 300 million years old and 1500 light-years away, M48 was unidentified until the 1950s due to a five degree error in Messier's published position, making it perhaps the most missing of the `missing' Messier objects.
Credit: NOAO/AURA/NSF

More NOAO images

Infrared image of open cluster M48, by the 2MASS telescopes. False colors were used to represent different IR wavelength bands, with reddest the coolest and blue the warmest objects in this image.

Amateur images of M48

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Hartmut Frommert
Christine Kronberg
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Last Modification: September 24, 2001