NGC 6281 (Open Cluster)
A bright open cluster in Scorpius, about 1,700 light-years away and 270 million years old. The Bug Nebula is 2° away.
Open cluster in Scorpius. Magnitude 5.4.
Can you see it from Guyana?
From Georgetown (6.8° N) it climbs to 45° above the southern horizon at its highest; from Lethem (3.4° N), to 49° above the southern horizon. It is highest at midnight on the night of 5 Jun, 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 4.7° south-east of Larawag.
- 10x50 binoculars: Resolves into dozens of stars.
- A small telescope (80 to 100 mm): A small, bright group of stars at low power.
- A camera: Tiny on camera: it needs 2,000 mm or more of focal length on a tracking mount.
How big, how bright, how far
- Size on the sky: 10.2′, 33% of the Moon's width (the Moon is about 31′ wide).
- Brightness: magnitude 5.4. Fainter than Georgetown's faintest stars (4.3) but brighter than Lethem's (6.0).
- Distance: 1,700 light-years. The light reaching your eye left it about 1,700 years ago, around the year 330.
- True size: 5 light-years across its catalogued outline; light crosses it in 5 years.
Apparent size from OpenNGC (Mattia Verga), CC-BY-SA-4.0.
What it is made of
- Type
- Open cluster
- Mass
- About 1,400 times the Sun's mass, in its stars
- Age
- About 270 million years (range 170 million years to 490 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 6281 521 pc; statistical 1,697-1,700 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 6281: total 1,445 ± 163 Suns.
More deep-sky objects: NGC 6231 (Northern Jewel Box) · War and Peace Nebula (NGC 6357) · M62 (Globular Cluster) · NGC 6124 (Open Cluster) · NGC 6388 (Globular Cluster) · Butterfly Cluster (M6)