NGC 869 is the western half of the famous double cluster in Perseus. WEBDA puts its distance as 6,800 light-years. Its age is listed as 12 million years. This makes it a very young cluster and explains the lack of red giant stars. Reddening is listed at just under 0.6 magnitudes. The cluster's discovery goes back to 130 B.C.E. when Hipparchus saw the double cluster. I don't find if he was able to see it was two separate objects though I doubt he did. Tycho Brahe and Johann Bayer also saw it but I found no dates. Both seem to have seen it as one object. Bayer gave both the designation of Ç Persei. Calling the eastern member "h" didn't happen until sometime in the 1840's. The next date is when Giovanni Hodiera recorded it sometime shortly before 1654. As he used a crude telescope he likely knew of the double nature of this fuzzy patch in the sky but still recorded it as one object.

This was one of my very earliest images. At the time I had some very wrong ideas about exposure time and how to limit glare around bright stars. As a result, I used only 3 two minute exposures for each filter. Still, it came out better than it should have once I reprocessed the original data using tools I didn't have when this was taken in 2006.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=3x2' RGB=3x2', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME