Brocchi’s Cluster
A distinctive pattern of stars in the Milky Way, better known as the Coathanger, photographed from Switzerland in a wide-field view of the summer sky.
This means the final image was created by combining many exposures, adding up to 3.4 hours — about 3 hours and 24 minutes — of collected light. This helps reveal fainter stars and gives the final image a cleaner, richer background.
Although traditionally called a cluster, Brocchi’s Cluster is now understood as a chance alignment of stars rather than a true gravitationally bound star cluster.
The stars only appear grouped from our point of view. In reality, they lie at different distances and move independently through the Milky Way.
A pattern written by perspective
Brocchi’s Cluster is one of those objects that shows how playful the night sky can be. Through binoculars or a small telescope, its brightest stars form a clear and memorable shape: a straight row with a curved hook, like a coathanger hanging in space.
For a long time, this object was treated as an open star cluster: a family of stars born together from the same cloud of gas and dust. Modern measurements, however, have shown a more interesting story. The stars are not physically bound to each other. They simply happen to line up from our perspective on Earth.
This does not make it less beautiful. In fact, it makes it more human. The Coathanger is a perfect example of how our eyes and imagination organise the stars into shapes, just as cultures throughout history have done with constellations.
In this wide-field image, Brocchi’s Cluster sits among the dense star fields of the Milky Way. The many background stars give the scene depth and atmosphere, while the brighter stars of the asterism stand out as a simple, recognisable pattern against a much richer cosmic background.
Images like this invite us to slow down and look carefully. Not every celestial object is a distant galaxy or a glowing nebula. Sometimes the most striking view is a small arrangement of nearby stars that has caught human attention because, from Earth, it looks wonderfully familiar.