|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The Pleiades star cluster, also
known as the Seven Sisters and Messier 45, is one of the brightest star
clusters visible in the northern hemisphere. It consists of many bright,
hot, young stars that were all formed at the same time around 100
million years ago within a large cloud of interstellar dust and gas. The
cluster contains hundreds of stars, of which only a handful are commonly
visible to the unaided eye. The blue haze that accompanies them is due
to very fine dust which still remains and preferentially reflects the
blue light from the stars. This star cluster lie some 425 light years
away in the constellation of Taurus.
This image is a composite from black and white images taken with the Palomar Observatory's 48-inch (1.2-meter) Samuel Oschin Telescope as a part of the second National Geographic Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS II). The images were recorded on two type of glass photographic plates - one sensitive to red light and the other to blue and later they were digitized. Credit: Caltech, Palomar Observatory, Digitized Sky Survey. In order to produce the color image seen
here, I worked with a total of 50 different
frames, 25 for each color band, coming from
2 different plates taken
between 1986 and 1989.
Original file is 10,252x9,735 pixels with a resolution of about 1 arcsec per pixel. The image show an area of sky large
2.7° x 2.7° (for
comparison, the full-Moon is about 0.5° in diameter). Other images of the same celestial field found online
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
