The Jewel Box cluster is well placed

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Deep Sky feed


Objects: NGC4755

Across much of the world, the Jewel Box open star cluster (NGC 4755, also known as the Kappa Crucis Cluster; mag 4.2) in Crux will be well placed in the evening sky in coming weeks. On 5 April it will reach its highest point in the sky at around midnight local time, and on subsequent evenings it will culminate four minutes earlier each day.

From Cambridge , however, it is not observable because it lies so far south that it never rises above the horizon.

At a declination of 60°21'S, it is easiest to see from the southern hemisphere but cannot be seen from latitudes much north of 9°N.

At magnitude 4.2, NGC4755 is tricky to make out with the naked eye except from a dark site, but is visible through a pair of binoculars or small telescope.

The position of NGC4755 is as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
NGC4755 12h53m30s 60°21'S Crux 4.2 0'00"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 5 Apr 2026

The sky on 5 April 2026
Sunrise
06:18
Sunset
19:14
Twilight ends
20:52
Twilight begins
04:40


Waning Gibbous

81%

17 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:27 11:06 16:45
Venus 07:12 14:07 21:01
Moon 22:18 02:59 07:35
Mars 05:42 11:36 17:31
Jupiter 11:21 18:55 02:30
Saturn 06:08 12:13 18:17
All times shown in EDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 planetary ephemeris published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

This event was automatically generated by searching the ephemeris for planetary alignments which are of interest to amateur astronomers, and the text above was generated based on an estimate of your location.

Image credit

© Digitised Sky Survey (DSS); Second Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-II)

Share