The Jewel Box lies just to the side of Beta Crucis, one of the crossbar stars of the Southern Cross. To the naked eye it is only a faint point of light, but good binoculars show a bright orange star, Kappa Crucis, set among a number of blue stars. This cluster of young stars was named in the mid-1830s by the British astronomer Sir John Herschel, who first viewed it from South Africa.
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Possum Observatory
Photograph by John Drummond
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