Daniel wrote:

 We don't know enough to draw boundry lines through the group. Robert wrote: As humans we like black and white explanations and prefer to find neat categories to put things in while nature prefers the infinite possibilities and variations. . . . I think it makes a lot more sense that objects like Omega Centari are reminding us that our desire to pigeon hole everything into nice neat categories and types is futile and self defeating.

For those of you who are driving down to the Bryce Astronomy Festival at night, you might want to carry some binoculars and pull of  Highway 89 to see if you can add cluster omega Cent to your "bagged" targets list. Robert, I view this tendency to label and categorize as the march of scientific knowledge flowing from the interplay of theory and observation.  The current generally accepted majority scientific paradrigm is only that - a temporary mental construct of reality that we agree to, full well knowing that over time advances in observation and or theories will supercede our present worldview - and properly should do so if science progressing. In that sense, I do not seek to categorize all objects using labels, but naming a thing is part of communicating that you understand its true known properties or one's best estimate of its suspected qualities.  I often refer to my paternal grandmother - born in 1904 and who passed in 1985.  At her birth in 1904, the size and shape of the Milky Way was not known and that galaxies were objects outside the solar system was unconfirmed,  the Hubble constant had not been discovered and the main stellar spectral sequence was unknown, Mars was still seriously considered in some circles to have canals, the Moon's craters were thought to principally be of volcanic origin and no human had viewed the backside of the Moon, radio astronomy had not been invented and gamma raw bursts were unknown, the Bohr model of the atom did not exist and had not be superceded by quantum mechanics, Newtonian time mechanics had not been superceded by relativistic time, the Standard Model did not exist, that fusion was the primary power source for Sun and stars was unknown, the Kupier Belt, the Oort Cloud and Trans-Neptunian Objects were unknown, Pluto was undiscovered, DNA and RNA were yet to be discovered much less manipulated by the PCR process coupled with gene sequence insertion, viruses had yet to be discovered. The list goes on. One thing that I enjoy about following professional astronomy is that it is a live science with a steady stream of new advances in the best tradition of the interplay of theory and observation.  The incorporation of Ceres and Pluto into a spectrum of trans-neptunian objects is a recent example based on new discoveries of outer solar system TNOs. IMHO, that there are legions of scientists out there, lazily sitting around on there backsides, sucking on the tax dole while observing, categorizing, theorizing and testing their models about the physical world gives me hope for humanity. Their activities are the furthest from "futile and self defeating" conduct that a member of homo sapiens can get. If I do reach 81 years old like grandmutter Helen, without stroking out or having a heart attack or cancer, I hope that everything I could have known as an infant in 1956 is just as hopelessly outdated and nostolagicly quaint as everything that grandmother Helen could have known in 1904.   The "futile and self-defeating" part of the western scientific outlook occurs when we mistake the ability of the scientific method to model reality as permanent, unfailing truth itself as opposed to a temporary best-predictive model.  One antidote to this is to sit, Zen like, in front of the eyepiece of my 10 inch Newt, staring into M24 or M13. - Clear Skies - Kurt