M-45 The Pleiades
This beautiful open cluster is one of the best known in all the world. It's visual appeal is stunning and it might be best described as blue, fiery diamonds. There are seven of the stars that are visible to the un-aided eye, but with only minor magnification the cluster is revealed as many more. Faint areas of nebulosity can be seen in telescopes at low power, but they are very obvious in long-exposure photographs like the one below. Most cultures today and in history had a name for this group of stars. Many "casual sky watchers" today mistakenly think it is the little dipper. Whatever the name, anyone who looks up at the winter sky has seen this sparkling little group of stars.
This image is a mosaic of two 35mm frames made with my 12.5" f/7 Newtonian. Each frame is a composite of two 1 hour exposures on hypered Kodak PJ 400 film, for a total of 4 exposures.