M45 / The Pleiades (Rex Robichaux)

M45 / The Pleiades

Perhaps one of the most iconic and recognizable objects in the night sky, M45 (The Pleiades or Seven Sisters) is a beautiful open cluster of stars that graces our northern hemisphere skies every winter. Ancient legends, myths, and traditions surround the Pleiades from almost every culture from the Greeks to Native Americans. Galileo Galilei is widely attributed to have been the first human to view the cluster through a telescope. M45 is considered an open cluster and is actually made up of around 800-1,000 stars and is located approximately 410-450 light-years from Earth.

The brightest stars in the cluster dominate the view from Earth due to the cloud of nebulous dust that the stars are actually gradually passing through as they slowly move towards Orion's feet. Light from these young, bright stars reflects a largely blue and white spectrum of light off of the surrounding dust producing the fine illuminated filaments we can see today.

This photo was captured from our front yard in Richmond, VA with no light pollution reduction/filtering and consists of about an hour and a half of total integration time. I'd have loved to have gotten more time on this but I'm changing gears for an M81 / M82 project.

Specs: 50x120" subs, 30 flats, 30 dark flats, 40 dark frames. Dithered every shot, sensor at -20c, Unity Gain. Zwo ASI 294MC pro, Teleskop-Service 130 APO, .80 Reducer, Skywatcher EQ6-R Mount.

Captured in APT (guiding with PHD2), stacked in DSS (sigma clipping), Processed in Startols (Autodevelop, minor crop for margins, wipe, develop, deconvolution, wavelet sharpen, color/saturation, minor start reduction / dim, and noise reduction), and finished in Lightroom CC with minor exposure and color/saturation adjustments. I hope you enjoy this winter gem in the sky!

Cloudy Nights
Suburban Astrophotography
Virginia Astronomers and Astrophotographers
Imaged with APT

	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

	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

	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

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.

Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4144015
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

Image Index:

Contribution Index (beta):

M45 / The Pleiades

M45 / The Pleiades

Equipment

Acquisition details

Description

Comments

Sky plot

Histogram

In these public groups

		...
You have no new notifications.

Image Index:

Contribution Index (beta):

M45 / The Pleiades

M45 / The Pleiades

Equipment

Acquisition details

Description

Comments

Sky plot

Histogram

In these public groups

Notifications

AstroBin is in READ ONLY mode

Sorry :-(

Sorry :-(

Sorry :-(

Are you really sure?

Warning!

Warning!

Are you sure?

Report abuse

Slideshow settings

IOTD/TP stats (last [x] days)

Distribution of astrophotographers

Distribution of subject types

Distribution of data sources

Sorry

Sorry

Share

Upload new revision

Upload uncompressed source (XISF/FITS/PSD/TIFF)

Delete image and all its revisions?

Delete original image?

Delete all other versions?

Delete all revisions?

IOTD/TP stats

The following people like this image

The following people bookmarked this image

Warning

Flag malfunctioning thumbnails

Contains

Remove yourself as a collaborator

Plate-solving information