The Plieades (M45) Open Star Cluster in Taurus
Taken by Bill Burnett on September 24, 2016 @
Hamilton, Montana USA
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Set within a cloud of interstellar dust we find the magnificent blue jewell-like open star cluster popularly known as The Pleiades or The Seven Sisters (M45). Located within the Constellation Taurus (The Bull), this open cluster has an apparent visual magnitude of 1.6 and an angular diameter of 110 arc-minutes.
This open cluster is easily visible with the naked eye even from light polluted skies and has been known from antiquity. Mention of it can even be found in the Hebrew Scriptures of the Holy Bible where it is identified by its Biblical Name, The Kimah Constellation (Job 9:9).
M45 is located at a distance of 425 light years from Earth and spans a diameter of 15 light years. The cluster contains 332 stars with an average age of 100 million years. Given the estimated age of the Universe at 10.5 +/- Billion years, they are relatively young stars that comprise this group.
The nebulosity surrounding the stars is light reflected from the particles of cold gas and dust into which the cluster has drifted. The nebulosity takes on the color of the blue stars in the cluster because tiny motes of interstellar dust scatter blue light more efficiently than the longer wavelengths of red light. The same goes for the scattering of sunlight in our Earth's atmosphere - that is why the sky is blue!. The nebulosity also appears streaky or rope-like because of the distribution of the dust particles in space.
This image was captured with a QHY183C beta Single Shot Color (SSC) Cooled Back-lit CMOS CCD camera mounted on a Takahashi Epsilon E-130D Astrograph/Telescope. Image consists of a stack of 24x 120 second light frames for a total integration time of 48 minutes.
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