NGC 2808 is one of the Milky Way's most massive clusters, containing more than a million stars.

The cluster is being disrupted by the galactic tide, trailing a long tidal tail.

[7] It had been thought that NGC 2808, like typical globular clusters, contains only one generation of stars formed simultaneously from the same material.

In 2007, a team of astronomers led by Giampaolo Piotto of the University of Padua in Italy investigated Hubble Space Telescope images of NGC 2808 taken in 2005 and 2006 with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys.

However, the great mass of a cluster such as NGC 2808 may suffice to gravitationally counteract the loss of gaseous matter.