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M45 (Melotte 22) · Open Cluster
Pleiades (Seven Sisters)
The Seven Sisters — the most famous open star cluster in the sky, its hot blue stars wrapped in a delicate veil of blue reflection nebulosity.
The Pleiades are a young open cluster of hot blue stars about 444 light-years away in Taurus, easily visible to the naked eye and known to cultures across the world since prehistory. The cluster is only around 100 million years old — an infant by stellar standards — and contains over a thousand stars, of which the brightest half-dozen form the familiar tiny dipper shape.
The blue haze around the brightest stars is a reflection nebula: a chance encounter with an unrelated cloud of interstellar dust that scatters the stars' blue light, much as a clear sky scatters sunlight. The nebulosity is brightest around Merope.
This is a wide-field DSLR view; the reflection nebulosity is faint and rewards dark skies and longer integration. Background extraction was used to keep the dust visible against a neutral sky.
// imaging sessions
session // 01
01.11.2025 DSLR broadband — Nikon D750 + Nikkor 55–300 mm on EQ5 Pro
- Gear
- Nikon D750 DSLR · Nikon 55–300 mm lens · Sky-Watcher EQ5 Pro SynScan GoTo
- Filters / frames
- None — DSLR broadband
- Total integration
- 30 s subs
- Frames
- 30 s subs
- Software
- Siril · GIMP
Wide-field of the Pleiades on 1 November 2025 (same night as M42), Nikon D750 + Nikkor 55–300 mm at ~280 mm on the EQ5 Pro SynScan GoTo, 30 s subs. Stacked in Siril; background-extracted and balanced in post to keep the blue reflection nebulosity.
