Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Taurus (Tau)  ·  Contains:  19 Tau)  ·  25 Tau)  ·  Barnard's Merope Nebula  ·  IC 349  ·  Maia Nebula  ·  Merope Nebula  ·  NGC 1432  ·  NGC 1435  ·  Sterope I (21 Tau)  ·  The star Alcyone (η Tau  ·  The star Asterope  ·  The star Celaeno (16 Tau)  ·  The star Electra (17 Tau)  ·  The star Merope (23 Tau)  ·  The star Sterope II (22 Tau)  ·  The star Taygeta (q Tau
Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
M45 (Pleiades), Brendan Kinch
M45 (Pleiades)
Powered byPixInsight
Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
M45 (Pleiades), Brendan Kinch
M45 (Pleiades)
Powered byPixInsight

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

Commonly called the Pleiades or Seven Sisters, M45 is known as an open star cluster. It contains over a thousand stars that are loosely bound by gravity, but it is visually dominated by a handful of its brightest members.
These hot blue luminous stars formed within the last 100 million years. Reflection nebulae around the brightest stars were once thought to be left over material from their formation, but are now considered likely to be an unrelated dust cloud in the interstellar medium through which the stars are currently passing. This dust cloud is estimated to be moving at a speed of approximately 18 km/s relative to the stars in the cluster.
The Pleiades cluster has been observed since ancient times, so it has no known discoverer. However, Galileo Galilei, the Italian scientist best known for discovering the largest moons of Jupiter and championing a heliocentric model of the solar system, was the first to observe the Pleiades through a telescope. M45 is located an average distance of 445 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus. It has an apparent magnitude of 1.6 and can be seen with the naked eye. The cluster is best observed during January.

Comments

Revisions

  • M45 (Pleiades), Brendan Kinch
    Original
  • Final
    M45 (Pleiades), Brendan Kinch
    B

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

M45 (Pleiades), Brendan Kinch

In these public groups

Takahashi Refractors