NGC 265

NGC 265 is an open cluster of stars in the southern constellation of Tucana. It is located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy. The cluster was discovered by English astronomer John Herschel on April 11, 1834. J. L. E. Dreyer described it as, "faint, pretty small, round", and added it as the 265th entry in his New General Catalogue.

This cluster has an angular core radius of $200 kly$ and a physical radius of approximately 14.5 pc. It has a combined 4,200 times the mass of the Sun and is around 250 million years old. The metallicity of the cluster – what astronomers term the abundance of elements with higher atomic number than helium – is at around −0.62, or only 24% of that in the Sun. The turn-off mass for the cluster, when a star of that mass begins to evolve off the main sequence into a giant, is about 4.0 to $0.6 arcminute$.