The Southern Pleiades (IC 2602) in the constellation Carina the Keel is a dazzling open cluster. It lies 550 light-years away and occupies a region 50′ in diameter. That’s 2.6 times as much area as the Full Moon covers.
IC 2602 contains about 75 stars surrounding blue, magnitude 2.7 Theta (θ) Carinae, so it’s sometimes referred to as the Theta Carinae Cluster. More commonly, however, observers call it the Southern Pleiades because its discoverer, French astronomer Nicolas Lou