M45, The Pleiades (Richard Francis)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Taurus (Tau) · Contains: 16 Tau · 17 Tau · 19 q Tau · 20 Tau · 21 Tau · 22 Tau · 23 Tau · 24 Tau · 25 eta Tau · 26 Tau · 27 Tau · 28 Tau · Alcyone · Asterope · Atlas · Celaeno · Electra · IC 349 · M 45 · Maia · Maia nebula · Merope · Merope nebula · NGC 1432 · NGC 1435 · Pleiades · Pleione · Sterope II · Taygeta · The star Atlas (27Tau) · And 7 more.

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M45, The Pleiades

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M45, The Pleiades

Update: I am now convinced that the ghosting is not due to reflections or stray light but is instead Residual Bulk Image (RBI), which has been made worse by the meridian flips. My sensor (8300) is known to suffer from this but the camera, unfortunately, has no mitigation hardware (in the form of a light flood).

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I have had some trouble processing this, without even mentioning a software crash which lost 2hr of data. The problem is that I clearly have a source of reflection somewhere which is giving ghost images of the many bright stars here. My first attempt had very prominent reflections, but after a series of experiments in Pixinsight I found that using Windsorised sigma clipping and a high rejection of 0.8 sigma (so rejecting enormous amounts of data) could reduce the severity to an acceptable level (though it's clearly still there). What made that work was that I had a couple of mount flips while acquiring the data so there was some scope for pixel rejection.

Anyway, about the target, I'm just going to repeat what I wrote for an earlier version: The Pleiades open star cluster, M45, is rather close, at about 400 light-years, and is bright in Winter skies. There are actually over 1000 stars in the group, but the dominant members are the hot B-type stars which dominate the image. The cluster is well-known for the reflection nebula in which it is embedded, which is in fact a dust cloud in the inter-stellar medium through which the cluster is currently moving.

UK Astro-Imaging

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	1378446
PixInsight job	L3ZXXKP3TLET4I6LE4RMCIBO8XVX8T7C
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	03h47m14s.63
RA (top/left)	03h50m09s.46
RA (top/right)	03h44m26s.78
RA (bottom/right)	03h44m21s.10
RA (bottom/left)	03h50m01s.90

Dec (center)	+24°07′03″.4
Dec (top/left)	+24°35′10″.9
Dec (top/right)	+24°37′21″.5
Dec (bottom/right)	+23°38′42″.6
Dec (bottom/left)	+23°36′34″.3

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M45, The Pleiades

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