M45 - The Pleiades Star Cluster
Updated: Mar 16
Featured on Universe Today IG August 2016.
Featured on Orion Telescopes & Binoculars 2016 Holiday Catalog, page 41.
Featured on Orion Telescopes & Binoculars "featured member" webpage.
Featured on the cover of The Astrophotographer's Journal.
Featured on The Astrophotographer's Guidebook.
Featured on Amateur Astrophotography Magazine - Issue 61
Featured on FLickr's Explore page - November 2019
The Pleiades, the beautiful Seven Sisters of the night sky, also the easiest and most impressive star cluster to photograph!
M45 is huge, extremely bright, and looks amazing in both close up shots using a telescope, or through wide field astrophotography. The stars in the Pleiades are blue, glowing against the faint nebulous gases they are passing through, visible around them.
We imaged Messier 45 three different times, and we show you each result in this post!
Using our old Canon t3i and our telescope for a total exposure time of 2 hours
Using our old Canon t3i wide-field with our 50mm lens for a total exposure time of 4 hours
Using our cooled monochrome astrophotography camera for a total exposure time of 3 hours
From our experience, taking a photo with an exposure of about 3 minutes is enough to see the reflection nebulae around the stars. It of course helps if you are under a beautiful dark sky, but the Pleiades are very bright and you should be able to get great results even from the city.
Below you will see our three attempts at this target so that you can really compare the results from each set up. These were all taken from a Bortle 4 zone.
Imaging the Pleiades with a DSLR Camera
February 6th, 2016
The photo below is the result of only 2 hours of total exposure with our unmodified Canon t3i, attached to our 8” f/3.9 Newtonian telescope!
This is a night we will never forget. We made one of the stupidest mistake in our "Astrophotography career" that day, and it bothered us so much that we never repeated that mistake ever again since. Lesson learned!
What did we do? This was our first attempt at guiding with our new Autoguiding package from Orion. We set it up and launched PHD2 on our laptop. Because of the 2-second long exposures, we were able to see a couple of white dots on our frames. We were complete beginners and thought these were stars, and decided to guide on one of them. We realized two hours later that our pictures were all blurry and full of star trails. This is because these "white dots" were just dust particles from the guide scope's cap we left on... All the frames from the two hours that passed all went to the trash. This is why we only have two hours of stackable data instead of four.
Note that the photo is uncropped and as you can see, Messier 45 fits perfectly in the frame of our 8" telescope.
GEAR USED:
Camera: Canon t3i (600D)
Telescope: Orion 8" Astrograph f/3.9
Mount: Atlas EQ-G motorized Mount
Coma: Baader MPCC Coma Corrector MkIII
Guiding: Starshoot Autoguider - 50mm Guide Scope
Processing: Pixinsight
ACQUISITION DETAILS:
Total Exposure Time: 2 hours
Exposure Time per frame: 3 minutes
40 lights - 15 Darks - 15 Bias
ISO: 400
Wide-field capture of the Pleiades with a camera lens
December 16th, 2015
The Pleiades is also an excellent target for wide field astrophotography. Our first successful attempt at this target was actually with our camera lens back when we did not own a telescope.
Attaching your DSLR camera to a sky tracker (such as the iOptron Skytracker or Omegon Mini Track LX2) will allow you to take long exposures (3 minutes in our case) and reveal the nebulosity behind the stars pretty easily. You can also directly attach your camera to your motorized mount if you have one!
A good thing to do if using a lens that is 50mm or wider, is to capture the California Nebula in the same frame!
For this, make sure to not center M45 but instead try to match the position of the cluster from our image below. Notice how you can get a lot of interstellar dust lane as well! Those seem to be dividing the Pleiades from the California Nebula.
GEAR USED:
Camera: Canon T3i (600D)
Lens: Canon 50mm f/1.8
Mount: iOptron Skytracker
Processing: Pixinsight
ACQUISITION DETAILS:
Total Exposure Time: 4 hours
Exposure Time per frame: 3 minutes
ISO: 800
Imaging the Pleiades with a small refractor telescope
October 2019
Not expecting to image that night, we decided to head out at the last minute and drive to a Bortle 5 zone (our usually spot is Bortle 3-4). We remember freezing to death that night as we also filmed our review video on the QHY Polemaster.
We decided to try out our ZWO ASI 071MC camera for the first time. We never tried a One Shot Color cooled camera in the past and were excited to see how this one would perform. Because of the cold, we only stayed out to image for one hour, and got this image below of the Pleiades star cluster. This is definitely better than we thought and we wish we spent three or four hours instead to get an incredible image. Next time for sure!
GEAR USED:
Camera: ZWO ASI 071MC
Telescope: Meade 70mm APO
Mount: Atlas EQ-G motorized Mount
Coma: Baader MPCC Coma Corrector MkIII
Guiding: ZWO ASI 290MM Mini
Acquisition: ZWO ASIAIR
Power: Pegasus Astro Pocket Powerbox
Processing: Pixinsight
ACQUISITION DETAILS:
Total Exposure Time: 1 hour
Exposure Time per frame: 1 minute
Gain: 90
Imaging the Pleiades with a cooled monochrome camera
November 22nd, 2019
More than three and a half years after photographing M45 with our DSLR camera, we decided to give it a try with our current camera, the ZWO ASI 1600MM. We spent a total of three hours on it this time, but faced a challenge we never had to deal with before here in Nevada: humidity.
While imaging, our entire equipment became very cold and wet, including the mirrors of our Newtonian telescope. Because we do not own a dew shield nor a dew heater, this definitely affected our image, and we believe it could have been much better than this. We are still happy anyway, as this version is neater than the one taken with our old DSLR camera.
GEAR USED:
Camera: ZWO ASI 1600mm Pro Mono
Telescope: Orion 8" Astrograph f/3.9
Mount: Atlas EQ-G motorized Mount
Coma: Baader MPCC Coma Corrector MkIII
Guiding: ZWO ASI 290MM Mini
Acquisition: ZWO ASIAIR
Power: Pegasus Astro Pocket Powerbox
Processing: Pixinsight
ACQUISITION DETAILS:
Total Exposure Time: 3 hours
Exposure Time per frame: 3 minutes
Filters: L (1h 30m) / R (30m) / G (30m) / B (30m)
Gain: 75
How to find the Pleiades?
The Pleiades are by far the easiest Deep Sky Object to spot in the night sky, they can be seen with the unaided eye, binoculars, and of course telescopes.
Light pollution does not affect the visibility of the main stars of the Seven Sisters, as they can be spotted from both a very dark site, and the heart of a bright city. With the naked eye, the cluster looks like several bright blue stars, linked to each other by small lines.
Through binoculars, it just looks like several big and luminous stars forming the shape of a cross. The nebulosity around the stars may be seen with a large aperture telescope, although it is very faint and difficult to make out.
M45 is located in the Taurus constellation, and is about four times the apparent size of the full moon. The cluster is slowly dispersing and drifting towards the Orion constellation, and will officially be part of the hunter in about 250 million years. it is not very far from the California Nebula.
Cool Facts
First observed by Galileo Galilei
Moving towards the Orion constellation
Name of the seven brightest stars making the Seven Sisters are Sterope, Electra, Merope, Maia, Celaeno, Taygeta & Alcyone
Single Shot & Processing of M45
Processing M45 is fairly easy, but can be tricky at times no matter what camera you use.
The one thing we struggled the most with was the very first step: The extraction of the Background. Using Dynamic Background Exctraction on Pixinsight, make sure to have another image of M45 ready next to you, and be certain to not have any of the crosses from the process where the nebulosity is supposed to be. The rest was pretty straight forward, just once again make sure that your background preview is not on some of the gases when doing the background neutralization process.
As for the wide field version, the only challenge is to reveal the black interstellar dust lanes within the image, but both M45 and the California Nebula pop out nicely without much trouble.
Below is what a single shot of M45 looks like using our ASI 1600MM. The single shot with the DSLR camera was actually pretty similar. See how just 3 minutes of exposure easily reveals some of the nebulosity.
Because our ASI 1600MM is a monochrome camera, we had to use filters which we later combined to make a color image. For this particular target, we used 4 filters: L, R, G and B.
You might wonder what the master files look like after combining each filter, so we decided to keep them and show them to you!
Below you can see the stacked image for each filter, in order: Luminance, Red, Green and Blue. You can see that they all look very similar.
Practice Makes Perfect
Our very first picture of the night sky, using a point and shoot camera, The Pleiades were visible in the very wide image - 09/11/2015
Our first DSLR picture of the Pleiades, 3 months later - 12/02/2015
Our first tracked picture of the Pleiades, using our DSLR, tripod, and iOptron Skytracker - 12/04/2015
Our first picture of the Pleiades with a telescope, having huge trouble with the guiding - 02/06/2016
Our first picture of the Pleiades with a cooled monochrome camera, struggling with humidity and dew - 11/22/2019
Between number 1 and number 4, we drove an hour back and forth to the desert 77 times in order to get this much progress that fast. That's 154 hours of driving without counting the hours of mounting the equipment every time. Don't expect to learn fast if you are not giving it 100%!
If you live away from light pollution and can photograph the night sky from your backyard, you are super lucky!
All our Versions of M45
Below are all of our versions of M45, taken over time. Our very first shot was taken on September 12, 2015. Our first "happy result" can be seen last from our DSLR camera.
Final Thoughts
The Pleiades Star Cluster is by far the most impressive and best cluster to photograph in the night sky. If photographed wide field, you will also be able to get the California nebula, as well as dark dust lanes in the image.
If you would like to get our image as a print or other, you can see some options HERE
Clear Skies,
Antoine & Dalia Grelin Galactic Hunter
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