The Seven Sisters
Kelly Carroll
The Seven Sisters. What’s the secret to astrophotography? Time.
The bottom image is just one 4-minute exposure and the top image is a combination of over 20 hours of exposure time. The final image was photographed over seven nights in the winter of 2021. These objects are so far away from Earth (444 light-years and the closest of the Messier objects) that it takes a lot of time and a camera to bring out the details.
The Pleiades is an open star cluster, ”middle aged” stars surrounded by a dust cloud in the interstellar medium through which the stars are currently passing.
Prominent in the winter sky (and seen before dawn in the summer). Galileo Galilei was the first astronomer to view the Pleiades through a telescope.