Messier 45 - Pleiades Seven Sisters Subaru Matariki - 29/10/2013 (Processed cropped stack)

The Pleiades, more commonly known as the 'Seven Sisters', has many other names as it has be named by most cultures since antiquity. It is a young (~100 million years) star cluster containing a number of very large and hot blue/white stars and is ~400 light years from Earth. The stars are passing in front of a gas and dust cloud that reflects blue light, only tenuously shown in the short suburban skies capture.

My first use of Tele Vue 0.8x Reducer/Flattener with my 80mm f/6 APO. Strong vigenetting cropped out here.

DeepSkyStacker 3.3.3b51 Stacked 85% of 20 Images ISO 800 60 Sec, 196 DARK, 75 BIAS, 0 FLATS, Post-processed with Adobe Photoshop CS5

Telescope - Apogee OrthoStar LOMO 80/480 with Tele Vue 0.8x Reducer/Flattener, Hutech IDAS LPS-P2 filter, Canon 40D DSLR field 132' x 199' , Ambient ~24-22C. EQMOD EQASCOM with Ascom 6 for mount control. Backyard EOS 2.09 for Image acquisition. Mount - Skywatcher NEQ6 Pro. Guidescope - Orion ShortTube 80 with Starlight Xpress SuperSTar (Mono) CCD Auto Guider and Stark Labs PHD auto guiding software.

messierm45 pleiades seven sisters subaru matarikiopen cluster

From 2013 Where to next?