Pleiades

About the object

The Pleiades, the brightest and one of the nearest open clusters in our sky: a few hundred stars about a hundred million years old that have not yet drifted away from their birthplace. Seven of the brightest are visible without optics; a telescope shows hundreds. The blue haze around the stars is not the remnant of the cloud they were born from but a chance interstellar dust cloud the cluster is passing through, which scatters the light of the hot stars.

Distance: about 444 light-years, apparent size in the sky: ≈ 2°, constellation Taurus.

How it was shot

Everything here was shot with a DWARF Mini smart telescope from a balcony in a city in Ukraine: light-polluted sky, only the eastern half of it visible, and a roof overhang that cuts off the south. 2 nights (all in August), 3 sessions, 1,450 frames with exposures of 1, 15 and 45 s, without a filter, in broadband. The stack holds 3 h 49 min of light; the longest night, 23 August, gave 1 h 55 min. The goal for this object is 1 h, and it is reached. First night 21 August 2026, last one 24 August 2026.

Pleiades in the night log: 20 August, 23 August.

How it went

The stars here are bright, so shooting went down a ladder of exposures: one-second frames keep the stars from clipping, longer ones collect the haze around them. The blue reflection nebulae are barely there in a city sky without a filter, and they decided how many nights the Pleiades would get. The final stack shows them around the brightest stars; from here only the darker nights of late autumn can add more.