Pleiades (Seven Sisters)

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.