Astrophotography: Pleiades

I had taken a little break over the holidays, but I am ready to get back to some blogging in 2017.  I did get one clear night over the holidays where I had time to get my scope out.  I had one target in mind and had been wanting to shoot it for awhile.  The target has many names.  Commonly is called Pleiades or the Seven Sisters, but is also known as Messier 45 (M45).

Pleiades is a star cluster were a bunch of stars are close to one another.  This is the closest star cluster to the Earth at 444 light years away and can be seen as a faint smudge in the winter sky.  The stars are hot B-type stars which just means they are very hot and blue!  They formed about 100 million year ago.

The best part about the Pleiades besides just being beautiful stars is that there is also some dust in the area that gives some beautiful nebulosity.  It was originally thought the dust was from the formation of the stars but this dust would have been lost years ago.  Now it is known the dust was just in the area the stars happen to be passing through.

My picture was taken with:

SV90 scope
Celestron AVX mount
D5300 camera
150x 60 second lights
45x darks
45x bias
45x flats
Stacked:  DeepSkyStacker
Processing:  PixInsight; Photoshop

The Seven Sisters is from Greek Mythology. Seven of the brightest stars are named for each of the sisters along with 2 other stars names for the sisters parents.

Here is another picture that I did not take as it is much better, but provides a great map of the stars names.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades