M 45
Selected by the Royal Observatory, Greenwich for their January 2019 Night Sky Highlights www.rmg.co.uk/night-sky-highlights-january-2019
The Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters and Messier 45, are an open star cluster containing middle-aged, hot B-type stars located in the constellation of Taurus. It is among the nearest star clusters 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. A faint reflection nebulosity around the brightest stars is believed to be an unrelated foreground dust cloud in the interstellar medium, through which the stars are currently passing.


TARGET
Nomenclature: M 45, Messier 45, The Pleiades, The Seven Sisters
Right Ascension: 03:46:50
Declination: +24:07:44
Size: 110 arc min
First Telescopic Examination: Galileo Galilei in 1610
EQUIPMENT USED
TS STar71 refractor
10Micron GM2000 HPS mount
QSI683wsg8 CCD camera
Astrodon filters
IMAGE CAPTURE
Red: 10x300 bin 1x1
Green: 10x300 bin 1x1
Blue: 10x300 bin 1x1
Lum: 22x900 bin 1x1
Total integration: 4 hours 30 minutes
Pixel scale: 3.182 arcsec/pixel
Field radius: 1.786 degrees
Capture dates: 7-12 November 2018
Capture location:  Alcalali, Spain
IMAGE PROCESSING
Pre-processing: CCDStack2
Post-processing: Photoshop CS2