Kemble's Cascade

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Kemble's Cascade, located in the constellation Camelopardalis, is an asterism - a pattern created by unrelated stars. It is an apparent straight line of more than 20 colorful fifth to 10th magnitude stars over a distance of approximately five moon diameters, and the open cluster NGC 1502 can be found at one end.

It was named by Walter Scott Houston in honor of Father Lucian J. Kemble (1922 - 1999), a Franciscan Friar and amateur astronomer who wrote a letter to Walter about the asterism, describing it as "a beautiful cascade of faint stars tumbling from the northwest down to the open cluster NGC 1502" that he had discovered while sweeping the sky with a pair of 7x35 binoculars.

Walter was so impressed that he wrote an article on the asterism that appeared in his "Deep Sky Wonders" column in the astronomy magazine "Sky & Telescope" in 1980, in which he named it "Kemble's Cascade".