Pleiades (M45) in Taurus

While at the Summer Star Party, after taking all those frames of the double cluster, I decided to try M45, the Pleiades.

The attempt was not completely successful.  I got only 20 2-minute frames and realize now, after processing both these and those for the double cluster, that more is almost always better, especially in this case where I have a lot of faint nebulosity that needs to be enhanced.  If you look closely, you will see strange striations running from the upper left to the lower right which are not part of the actual nebulosity but noise or calibration issues.  The only cure is more data.  So next chance I get, more pictures of this one!

And…what does more data look like for this? Well, I think this image is already in my blog, but hey, it’s worth showing again. I had wanted to take a composite that covers from M45 all the way up the California nebula to try to bring out the wispy dust lanes that are starting to show up here, but that’s even more data. This is already over 6 hours of exposure.