Astro Arash

M45 – Pleiades

The Pleiades, or the seven sisters, is one of the most famous star clusters. These hot blue stars are about 450 light years away. They are fairly young, having been born within the past 100 million years. Their light shines upon some interstellar dust, making the reflection nebula we see from Earth.

I remember having a lot of trouble with M45. Rather than rush through things, I decided to slowly work my way through my process and understand what I was doing wrong. There were a lot of things I learned with M45.

Perhaps the biggest lesson was understanding the limitations of my star tracker. Longer exposures are naturally appealing, but the 3 minute exposures I was originally trying gave me a lot of headaches. Eventually, through trial and error, I settled on 45 second exposures, which seemed to work well.

Overall, I accumulated about 3.7 hours worth of exposure over several nights.

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