What causes the lines of stars I see in photographs of M39?

Messier 39 , NGC 7092, is an open star cluster in the constellation Cygnus at a distance of about 800 light years or so. There are many bright stars in it, but in my copy of a photograph, I can ss no obvious patterns. They eye is very good at looking at even random dots and picking out linear patterns which have no real physical significance. Small numbers of stars form many linear and quasi linear patterns which the human visual system is fine tuned to seek out.


Copyright 1997 Dr. Sten Odenwald
Return to Ask the Astronomer.