Commonly known as NGC 2420, the Twinkling Comet Cluster is an open cluster near the constellation Gemini. NGC 2420 is not a Messier object and doesn’t have a Messier number. At magnitude 8.3, it cannot be seen by the naked eye, but maybe it was seen via averted vision and thought to be a twinkling comet.

The cluster is in the center of the frame.

North (toward Polaris) is up in the photo. The picture was taken with a fully modified Canon Rebel camera (this is my one shot color camera) on a TEC 140 telescope in the Alpenglow-Torrey House Observatory in the dark sky community of Torrey, Utah (Bortle 2-3).

10 20 second sub-frames were used and stacked in Deep Sky Stacker = three minute 20 second photo. Binned 2X2. Unguided, no darks or flats. Processed in Photoshop (CS5).

Location in the night sky of the photo:

Source: Astrometry.net