Most stars do not form in isolation, but are in clusters ranging from dozens to thousands of stars.  

Even in our galaxy, the Milky Way, with stars more than 13 billion years old, has a lot of young, hot action: new objects form and others are destroyed.  NGC 2547 is an example.

How young is young, cosmically? Considering that our Sun is 4.6 billion years old and has not yet reached middle age, NGC 2547's stars ranging from 20 to 35 million years old is really young. If you imagine that our Sun as a 40 year-old person, the bright stars in the picture below are three-month-old babies.

 The star cluster NGC 2547 lies in the southern constellation of Vela (The Sail), about 1,500 light-years from Earth, and is bright enough to be easily seen using binoculars. It was discovered in 1751 by the French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille during an astronomical expedition to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, using a tiny telescope of less than two centimeters aperture. 

While NGC 2547 contains many hot stars that glow bright blue, a telltale sign of their youth, you can also find one or two yellow or red stars which have already evolved to become red giants. Open star clusters like this usually only have comparatively short lives, of the order of several hundred million years, before they disintegrate as their component stars drift apart.

This image from the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile, shows the bright open star cluster NGC 2547. Between the bright stars, far away in the background of the image, many remote galaxies can be seen, some with clearly spiral shapes. Credit: ESO

Clusters are key objects for astronomers studying how stars evolve through their lives. The members of a cluster were all born from the same material at about the same time, making it easier to determine the effects of other stellar properties.

Between the bright stars in this picture you can see plenty of other objects, especially when zooming in. Many are fainter or more distant stars in the Milky Way, but some, appearing as fuzzy extended objects, are galaxies, located millions of light-years beyond the stars in the field of view.