The Pleiades is such a wonderful cluster which has been recognized since ancient times and is also my favorite open cluster. It is easily visible with the naked eye unlike so many other objects and it is relatively easy to locate due to its close proximity to the bright star Aldebaran which is halfway between The Pleiades and Orion. Located in the Constellation of Taurus at 444 light-year from our solar system,
M45 is made up of 500 to 1000 mostly hot blue stars. It turns out the nine brightest stars of the are named for the Seven Sisters of Greek mythology: Sterope, Merope, Electra, Maia, Taygeta, Celaeno, and Alcyone. The other two stars are their parents Atlas and Pleione.
This region of space contains a huge amount of dust and the open cluster is currently passing through it creating a gorgeous blue reflection nebula. So I feel like I cheated on this object as the total exposure was just under an hour. I was not planning to image this since I was about to remove the Hyperstar for a while, however, there were a couple of exceptionally clear nights with no moon and the weather was not looking good for the rest of the week so I decided to image something bright that I could finish in one or two nights. I was planning on more exposures but clouds moved in so all I managed was about an hour - but what an hour. This image is just as good as my previous versions with much longer time, hence the Hyperstar allows you to cheat. One of my favorite parts of the image is the dusty spires which came out much better than I anticipated. Ironically, the stars are better on this Hyperstar image than on my previous Hyperstar images in my opinion. Maybe it is because the exposures were only 30 seconds this time.
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