M45 - dusting off the Pleiades (Tom Gray)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Taurus (Tau) · Contains: Barnard's Merope Nebula · IC 349 · Maia Nebula · Merope Nebula · NGC 1432 · NGC 1435 · The star Atlas (27Tau) · The star Celaeno (16Tau) · The star Electra (17Tau) · The star Merope (23Tau) · The star Pleione (28Tau) · The star Sterope I (21Tau) · The star Taygeta (19Tau) · The star ηTau

M45 - dusting off the Pleiades, Tom Gray

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M45 - dusting off the Pleiades

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M45 - dusting off the Pleiades

At last...a decent night with reasonable seeing and coinciding with new moon. My first attempt at the Pleiades, using my new ‘wider-field’ rig, and without the severe vignetting in my previous image.

I am very pleased to have captured the bright reflections as these ‘middle aged’ (at 100m years) stars pass through interstellar dust; at around 400 LY, this is the closest Messier object to earth.

Captured in Envisage, pre-processed and aligned in Nebulosity and processed in Startools 1.7. As ever, any comments and suggestions to improve my processing are welcome. There are some very peculiar anomalies beside the brighter stars (black-grey dashes), which have been reported with the Meade DSI series of cameras; if anyone has a fix, please let me know.

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Description: This version was stacked and aligned in Penumbra v0.6 with gentle HDR brightening and sharpening, improving the contrast, and repair of a few anomalies in Startools v1.6. The original image was heavily over-processed resulting in too much noise! As ever, I welcome your comments and suggestions.

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Description: Messing in(verted) monochrome

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Altair Astro 183 M/C Hypercams
UK Astro-Imaging
Low-Cost Astrophotography

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Astrometry.net job	4092112
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M45 - dusting off the Pleiades

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