What Is The Pleiades?
The Pleiades, also known as The Seven Sisters, M45, and Messier 45, is an open star cluster existing of middle-aged, hot B-type stars in the constellation Taurus. It is among the star clusters nearest to Earth and is the cluster most obvious to the naked eye in the night sky.
The cluster is dominated by hot blue and luminous stars that have formed within the last 100 million years. The reflection nebulae around the brightest stars make this star cluster very attractive.
On the right, you can see an astrograph of M45 that I took on several cold nights. Although I’m imaging mostly in a Bortle 6 sky, it’s possible to get pretty pictures of this object because it gets high enough (63°) in my region.
I imaged this with a 86/464mm quadruplet 4-Element flatfield apo refractor (Petzval design) from Telescope Optics. In combination with the camera ZWO ASI533MC Pro, this telescope gives a nice clean image with less noise. Especially when doing long exposures/long integration time.
The difficulty of this target lies in not overexposing the bright stars. Therefore you can use several exposure times (HDR composition).
Because the Pleiades are prominently visible in the winter night sky of the Northern Hemisphere for quite a while, you can spend a long time imaging this object when… the weather plays in your favor of course :-).
Image details
- Telescope: TS Optics 86SDQ 86mm F5.4 Quadruplet 4-Element Flatfield APO Refractor (TS86SDQ)
- Mount: iOptron CEM on tri-pier iOptron
- Camera: ZWO ASI533MC Pro
- Filter: ZWO UV/IR cut filter 1.25″ (ZWO EFW Mini)
- Dew Heater: DEW NOT
- Telescope Control: ZWO ASIair gen.1
- Software: Astro Pixel Processor (stacking & processing); PixInsight (post-processing)
Data captured during the nights: 06/11-07/11/2020; 12/11/2020; 17/12/2020 & 12/02/2021 (*SQM-L: 18.80, Bortle class 6)
Total integration time: 9.35 hrs
No guiding
*SQM-L was only measured during the night of 12/02/2021 (SQM purchased January 2021)
