This episode's coordinates point to the open cluster IC 2602, which consists of a gravitationally bound collection of relatively young stars (including many young blue stars) spread over a region with a diameter of over 14 light years or more than three times the width of the Moon as seen from Earth [1].
The IC in the cluster's name stands for Index Catalogue. Published in 1895 [2], this catalog of star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies was a supplement to the New General Catalogue, which was published in 1888 and which is no longer considered "new" [3]. On the other hand, the original General Catalogue is even older than the New General Catalogue. Anyhow, the star cluster was discovered over a century before the publication of these catalogs in 1755 by French astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille [4], the same weird astronomer who gave us the constellations named after a microscope, a telescope, an air pump, a painter's easel, and a clock, among other things [5]. IC 2602 itself is not located within any of these crazy constellations but instead in the constallation Carina, which represents the keel of the ship in the ancient and much larger constellation Argo Navis.
IC 2602 goes by a few other names. Sometimes, it's called the Theta Carinae Cluster, which refers to the brightest star system in the cluster, Theta Carinae. This star system consists of a very bright, blue, hydrogen-fusing star in orbit around an unseen companion. For people who aren't very familiar with how stars are named, German astronomer Johann Bayer introduced a convention in 1603 where all the stars in every constellation were given names based on Greek letters, with the brightest star in a constellation being labelled alpha, the second being labelled beta, the third gamma, and so on and so forth. However, sometimes mistakes were made, so for example, the first brightest star in a constellation might accidentally be labelled beta. Even so, we can infer that Theta Carinae is the eighth brightest star in the constellation Carina. The star has a magnitude of about 2.8 [6], which makes it fairly bright for a star in any open cluster.
IC 2602 is also commonly referred to as the Southern Pleiades. However, this would imply that IC 2602 is the southern hemisphere's less exciting version of the Pleiades. The Pleiades is one of the most exciting open clusters in the northern hemisphere; it can be seen with the naked eye, it appears in the Messier Catalogue, countless myths have been created about the clustger, and even a car company has been named after it. While IC 2602 or the Southern Pleiades doesn't have the same mythology behind it, and no one will ever drive an IC 2602 Forester down the street, IC 2602 is still a notable amateur astronomy object, and it is even listed in the Caldwell Catalogue of amateur astronomy objects as number 102 [1]. The cluster has a magnitude of 1.9 [7], which makes the cluster as a whole visible to the naked eye, and as I already mentioned, its brightest star is also visible without a telescope. The only reason why IC 2602 is nowhere near as famous as the Pleiades themselves is just because the cluster is located so far south that it is only really visible from the Southern Hemisphere.
This also affected the science work that has been done with IC 2602. While many northern hemisphere open clusters have been studied very extensively, IC 2602 seemed to have been ignored even though it could count as one of the brightest open clusters as seen from Earth. In terms of scientific papers that focus specifically on IC 2602, the oldest paper that I could find dates back to 1953 (and was written by Armenia's greatest astronomer ever, Beniamin Markarian, who has recently been appearing in every podcast episode that I have been doing) [8]. However, research on the cluster really did not pick up in speed until the 1980s after substantial numbers of modern observatories had been built in the Southern Hemisphere in places like Chile and Australia.
The research that has been published on IC 2602 has primarily taken advantage of the cluster's close proximity to Earth; the distance to the cluster is 496 light years (152 pc) [9]. The cluster is also very interesting because it is only about 44 million years old [10, 11, 12], which makes it very young in terms of open clusters.
A lot of the published research seems to focus specifically on the chemical composition of the outer atmospheres of the stars in the cluster. Lithium and beryllium specifically have been extensively studied by people who are interested in the mixing of gases within stellar interiors [13, 14, 15, 16, 17], while other astronomers have looked at elements like yttrium, zirconium, lathanum, and cerium to understand how much of this material was present in the nebula that the cluster formed out of and to compare this to the amount of these elements in other clusters [18].
Theta Carinae itself (or technically the big blue star in Theta Carinae) has been designated as chemically peculiar, which means that the ratios of elements in its outer atmosphere looks strange compared to the Sun or other "normal" stars. This peculiarity may be related to the fact that the two stars in the Theta Carinae system, which are separated by a distance of about 1.4 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon, are so close that their magnetic fields are interacting and gas can be transferred between the stars, and this has changed the relative abundances of the various elements on the surface of the bigger blue star [19].
Aside from the chemistry of the stars in IC 2602, other researchers have focused on the rotation of the stars in the cluster [20, 21, 22, 23], which have been observed to be rotating as fast as once every 5 hours or so [22]. This speedy rotation could be because the cluster recently formed, so the stars, which are basically giant balls of gas sloshing around, haven't really had a chance to slow down yet. Some other papers have focused on stellar flaring [21, 24, 25, 26], which is going to be very common in recently formed stars like the ones in IC 2602 where the stars haven't quite settled down into some sort of stable state. The cluster has also been a popular place to search for exoplanets and circumstellar dust disks [27, 28], and in fact, an exoplanet has been found orbiting one of the stars in the cluster [28].
If you want to observe IC 2602, or the Southern Pleiades, it's really only visible from the Southern Hemisphere. Carina is such a mess that I can't easily describe where exactly to search for IC 2602 other than to say that it's at the bottom of a round polygon of stars at the east end of the constellation. Given the relative brightness of the stars in the constellation and the area over which the stars are dxistributed, I would recommend observing the stars either with binoculars or with a telescope with low magnification and a wide field of view.