This episode's coordinates point to an object in the constellation Cassiopeia. The two things to keep in mind about this constellation is that, one, Cassiopeia is shaped like a W, and two, this is amateur astronomers' go-to place to find open clusters, or at least it is for people in the Northern Hemisphere, and that is because Cassiopeia sits inside the plane of the Milky Way, which is where most open clusters will be found.
The specific object that this episode's coordinates point to is the open cluster Messier 103 (M103), although professional astronomers tend to call it NGC 581. This is the ninth Messier object to appear in my podcast series, which means that I am still on track to randomly select all of the Messier objects sometime after episode 2000. Anyway, the cluster is located at a distance of roughly 8700 light years (2700 pc) [1], it has a width of about 1/8 of a degree (or one quarter the diameter of the moon) [2], and it has a magnitude of around 7.4 [3], so the object is slightly too faint to be seen with the naked eye. The cluster is relatively young; it has an age of somewhere around 29 million years [1]. This means that it contains a lot of young blue stars with short lifespans. It's most notable feature is a chain of three bright stars, two of which are blue and one of which is red, that stretches across the center of the cluster.
Messier 103 was discovered in 1781 by Pierre Méchain [4], who was Charles Messier's junior collaborator and sidekick. Méchain would sort of be like Robin if Charles Messier is Batman. Like everything else in the Messier Catalogue, M103 is one of many faint fuzzy things that Messier and Méchain wanted to keep track of so that they and other people would not accidentally mistake them for comets, which both astronomers thought were much more interesting than the galaxies, star clusters, and nebulae that they were discovering and tabulating . Interestingly, Messier was originally planning on capping the number of objects in his catalog at 100; Messier 103 as well as the spiral galaxy Messier 101 (which I discussed in episode 155) and the potential typographical error Messier 102 were all last-minute additions to Messier's final catalog [5].
In terms of scientific importance, the objects in the Messier Catalogue range from fundamentally important to shaping our understanding of the universe to scientific historical footnotes. Messier 103 is located closer to the historical footnote end of that scale. The cluster is not especially bright or close or otherwise unusual, so professional astronomers just haven't spent much time focusing in on this specific cluster. I did find a small number of scientific papers that discussed targeted observations of Messier 103, and this included things like searching for variable stars [6, 7] or measuiring the colors and magnitudes of the stars [8, 9, 10], which can be used to identify the age of the cluster, but at the end of the day, it's just not that scientifically important. You can do these types of analyses on virtually any cluster in the sky. This would be in contrast to the open cluster that I discussed a couple of episodes ago, IC 2602. That open cluster is much closer and brighter than Messier 103, and because it is so close, IC 2602 has in recent decades been targeted in multiple studies exploring the detailed nature of the stars within the cluster in ways that can't be done with most open clusters. However, IC 2602 is only really visible from the Southern Hemisphere, but Messier 103 is easily visible from the Northern Hemisphere, and because Charles Messier and Pierre Méchain were based in France and not the French island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, Messier 103 made it into the Messier Catalogue and IC 2602 did not.
Even if Messier 103 is not an outstanding target for scientific study, it's still an outstanding target for amateur astronomy. The cluster is located about 1 degree from Delta Cassiopeiae (the star at the lower left point of the W) in the direction towards Epsilon Cassiopeiae (the star at the left upper tip of the W). The cluster may not be visible to the naked eye, but it should be visible in binoculars or a small telescope [5, 11, 12]. The key to observing this object is to use low magnification power. Even in a small telescope with low magnification, it should be possible to see several of the brightest stars in the cluster, including the chain of three bright stars stretching across the middle [5, 11, 12]. The next time I'm at a dark site with a telescope, I plan to go look for this object.