M45, The Pleiades
This is a four panel mosaic of the most famous star cluster in our sky. It has been known since antiquity by various names including The Pleiades, The Seven Sisters, and Subaru. The exposures in this image total 23 hours, but at least 30 hours of imaging over 11 nights in November and December were needed to acquire this data. The difference is because not all data was used. Some of it was not useful because the telescope was not positioned properly, or the sky conditions just weren't good enough, or the astronomer screwed something up, or some such reason.
I've worked hard to try to create this image as true to color as I could. The blue colors are due to preferential scattering of the brilliant light from the cluster's main stars. In essence, this beautiful object is blue for the same reason our sky is blue. The background contains a multitude of faint galaxies, most of which are lost in this downsized version. You can see the full size image, at 7200x6738 pixels, or 48 megapixels, on my Astrobin.
Image acquired at Sugar Grove Observatory, a facility of Twin City Amateur Astronomers, (tcaa.us).
M45, The Pleiades
This is a four panel mosaic of the most famous star cluster in our sky. It has been known since antiquity by various names including The Pleiades, The Seven Sisters, and Subaru. The exposures in this image total 23 hours, but at least 30 hours of imaging over 11 nights in November and December were needed to acquire this data. The difference is because not all data was used. Some of it was not useful because the telescope was not positioned properly, or the sky conditions just weren't good enough, or the astronomer screwed something up, or some such reason.
I've worked hard to try to create this image as true to color as I could. The blue colors are due to preferential scattering of the brilliant light from the cluster's main stars. In essence, this beautiful object is blue for the same reason our sky is blue. The background contains a multitude of faint galaxies, most of which are lost in this downsized version. You can see the full size image, at 7200x6738 pixels, or 48 megapixels, on my Astrobin.
Image acquired at Sugar Grove Observatory, a facility of Twin City Amateur Astronomers, (tcaa.us).