M45, The Pleiades , Tim Stone

M45, The Pleiades

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

After many versions of this image, I've finally arrived at one that I'm mostly happy with. I'd been having a terrible time getting the four panels to register against each other properly. In this version I think I've finally solved the registration problem. This took me three hours to create, where previous versions had taken me a couple of nights. I've managed to preserve the star colors better, and overall I think this is about as good as this data and my skills can do.

At a distance of around 400 light years, the Pleiades is the closest galactic cluster of any size to us. It is in the late stages of the starbirth cycle. It has dispelled almost all of its hydrogen cloud, and illuminates a vast region of dust. Because the dusty shapes seem to have very little correlation with radiation pressures from the Pleiades brilliant blue supergiant stars, it's believed the dust is in the vicinity by chance. Soon, astronomically speaking, one-by-one the stars will be ejected from the cluster by their gravitational interactions. Eventually the region of space that birthed these stars will have no greater star density than the average in our galaxy's disk. But for now, we're privileged to see their spectacular debut on the galactic stage.

This is the result of an epic imaging project, a four panel LRGB mosaic of the Pleiades taken with the Planewave CDK17 and the Apogee 16M camera. With its .75 degree field, it required four images to cover the main body of this cluster. The data was acquired on 11 nights in November and December 2013.

When downloading the full resolution version, be mindful that it's a 48.5 megapixel, 18mb image!

Image acquired at Sugar Grove Observatory, a facility of Twin City Amateur Astronomers, (tcaa.us).

Comments

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M45, The Pleiades , Tim Stone