Image:M45.jpg

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Image
File history
File links

No higher resolution available.
M45.jpg‎ (720 × 576 pixels, file size: 102 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)

[edit] Summary

The Pleiades (star cluster) (NGC1432): One of the best known, and most photographed of all open star clusters, the Pleiades is often called the Seven Sisters and is often wrongly identified as the “little dipper” by beginners. This very near cluster is estimated at 115 million years old, is located only 440 light years away and contains over 3000 young stars. It also contains some very faint blue reflection nebulas, which show up only in long photographic exposures. As the cluster passes through a large dust cloud in the Milky Way, the reflected light of the hot blue stars of the cluster illuminates the dust and gas. The cloud and the stars are not connected, and both are moving at different speeds.

[edit] Photographic Details

This is a single 40 minute exposure with the Meade LXD75 8” Schmidt Newtonian telescope. The image was captured at prime focus with an Olympus OM-1 SLR and Fujichrome Provia 400F slide film. The telescope was manually guided during tracking with an Orion 910mm f/l guidescope. (c)2005 Peter Kennett - www.PetesAstrophotography.com. See Astrophotography to learn more about this style of photography.

[edit] Licensing

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following licenses:

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. Subject to disclaimers.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

You may select the license of your choice.

The Wikimedia Commons has another file with the same name as this file. To include the Commons media file in Wikipedia, this locally stored file needs to be renamed.

File history

Click on a date/time to view the file as it appeared at that time.

	Date/Time	Dimensions	User	Comment
current	08:23, 23 January 2007	720×576 (102 KB)	Peterkennett (Talk \| contribs)	( The Pleiades Star Cluster (NGC1432): One of the best known, and most photographed of all open star clusters, the Pleiades is often called the Seven Sisters and is often wrongly identified as the “little dipper” by beginners. This very near cluster)