NGC 6124 (Open Cluster)
A large, rich open cluster in Scorpius, about 2,000 light-years away. Gaia counts about 1,700 members and a mass of about 5,600 Suns.
Open cluster in Scorpius. Magnitude 5.8.
Can you see it from Guyana?
From Georgetown (6.8° N) it climbs to 43° above the southern horizon at its highest; from Lethem (3.4° N), to 46° above the southern horizon. It is highest at midnight on the night of 26 May, in the middle of its season. The page works out tonight's rise, highest point and set for both towns in Guyana time (UTC-4), and where the Moon is.
What you'll see
- Your eyes: Visible to the eye only from a dark site, as a hazy knot of stars; lost in city skies. It lies 8.0° south-west of Larawag.
- 10x50 binoculars: Resolves into dozens of stars.
- A small telescope (80 to 100 mm): A rich field of stars at the lowest power, spread over a quarter of a degree.
- A camera: Spans about 40% of an APS-C frame at 2,000 mm (field 0.7° × 0.4°); needs a tracking mount.
How big, how bright, how far
- Size on the sky: 13.5′, 43% of the Moon's width (the Moon is about 31′ wide).
- Brightness: magnitude 5.8. Fainter than Georgetown's faintest stars (4.3) but brighter than Lethem's (6.0).
- Distance: 2,000 light-years. The light reaching your eye left it about 2,000 years ago, around the year 30.
- True size: 7.8 light-years across its catalogued outline; light crosses it in 7.8 years.
Apparent size from OpenNGC (Mattia Verga), CC-BY-SA-4.0.
What it is made of
- Type
- Open cluster
- Mass
- About 5,600 times the Sun's mass, in its stars
- Age
- About 78 million years (range 50 million years to 130 million years)
What is in it, not measured:
- Stars born together: from one cloud of gas, at one time
How we know: Distance from Gaia parallaxes of its stars: Hunt & Reffert 2024, A&A 686, A42 (Gaia DR3 cluster catalogue, VizieR J/A+A/686/A42), retrieved 2026-10-21: NGC 6124 612 pc; statistical 1,995-1,998 ly (16th-84th percentile); Gaia DR3 parallax zero-point systematics (about 0.02 mas) add about 1%. True size: the apparent size times the distance (apparent size: OpenNGC (Mattia Verga, CC BY-SA 4.0), commit 4e2398a2). Mass: Hunt & Reffert 2024, A&A 686, A42 (Gaia DR3 cluster catalogue, VizieR J/A+A/686/A42), retrieved 2026-10-21, NGC 6124: total 5,556 ± 291 Suns.
More deep-sky objects: NGC 6231 (Northern Jewel Box) · NGC 6281 (Open Cluster) · M62 (Globular Cluster) · War and Peace Nebula (NGC 6357) · NGC 6388 (Globular Cluster) · Globular Cluster M4