Messier 45 - The Pleiades (Steve Rosenow)

Messier 45 - The Pleiades

Photograph of the Pleiades using a Nikon D5100/Spiratone 500 f/8 mirror lens. Camera/lens piggybacked to a Meade LX-5/2080. Manually guided using the LX-5 hand controller.

This was a little more than an hour's worth of integration using a new lens to my arsenal. A few days ago, I picked up a Spiratone 500mm f/8 Schmidt-Cassegrain mirror lens at an antique shop for a rather inexpensive price and a few hours ago, I had a chance to test it!

And what did I choose to test it on? The Pleiades open cluster, of course!

Had seen that the skies were clear, so I set up the telescope, and it ended up being a "sucker hole" that provided me a little time! I had thought the clearing would've lasted a lot longer (our 83-day record-breaking hot and dry stretch of weather was abruptly ended last week by rain that has been virtually non-stop) but that was not the case. As I was gearing to do more work to it to bring out a little more nebulosity and a little more of the red fringe around the cluster, rain clouds quickly moved in ending my imaging session for the night.

All exposures at ISO800

4 x 10 minutes

2 x 5 minutes

1 x 1 minute

2 x 30 second

Stacked in DSS with final work in Photoshop.

Please note: The following tables are updated every 24 hours.

Distribution of astrophotographers

This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

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PixInsight job	n/a
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