How many times have I already argued that appearances can be so deceiving when observing the night's sky? Sirius shines so brightly that you'd easily think it must be the biggest star out there, but then you realise it only lies 8 light-years away from us. Deneb, the brightest star in Cygnus, looks a lot fainter than Sirius from our perspective, but radiates no less than 200,000 (!) solar luminosities at us from its 1,400 light-year distance.
Now look at this lovely open cluster, NGC2129, which you'll find on the border between Gemini and Taurus. It's an easy target even for binoculars and that's mainly due to the two bright stars at its centre. Now what if I told you that in reality these two stars aren't even remotely close to the cluster and that they only appear to be part of it from our perspective? Indeed, the brightest of the two (HD250290) is an ordinary, 3 solar mass yellow giant, which lies 1,800 light-years away. Its fainter "sister" that lies slightly below (HD250289) is a similar yellow giant but it lies at a distance of 2,700 light-years. And the rest of the cluster? Well, you'd have to travel three times as far, 7,200 light-years to be precise. So those two bright stars have nothing to do with it whatsoever, nor are they related to each other. They just happen to float in front of this lovely, remote cluster which contains about three dozen stars and which is slowly breaking up under the gravitational force of our galaxy.
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