M45 is one of the most prominent objects in the night sky. To the naked eye, the Pleiades looks like a miniature Little Dipper. Observers with good vision will easily identify 7 stars, and this gives the Pleiades its nickname - the Seven Sisters. In actuality, the cluster contains over 1,000 stars.

The cluster is a very young cluster, and is dominated by hot, blue stars. M45 is passing through a dust cloud in the Milky Way. As a result, the blue light from the brightest stars reflects off the background dust, thus causing the blue nebulosity surrounding the cluster.

In this image, North is Up.

Exposure Details
Lens	Celestron C-8 SCT with Celestron focal reducer
Focal Length	1260mm
Focal Ratio	f/6.3
Mount	Schaefer GEM - 7 1/2
Guiding	80mm f/11 guidescope with PHD Guiding
Camera	Canon 450D - Gary Honis modified
Exposure	117 subexposures of 180 seconds each at ISO 1600 - over 5 3/4 hours total
Calibration	30 darks, 30 flats, 30 bias
Date	December 14 and 22, 2011
Temperature	31F on 12/14, 34F on 12/22
SQM Reading
Seeing	3/5 on both nights
Location	Pine Mountain Club, California
Software Used	Images Plus 4.0 for camera control, calibration, stacking, digital development, and multiresolution smoothing. Photoshop CS5 used for flat fielding, levels and curves, color balance, high pass filter, star shrinking, saturation adjustments, and noise reduction. Carboni Tools for additional saturation adjustments and noise reduction.
Notes	This astrophotograph includes images taken from the very first night I used my new Gary Honis modified Canon 450D. Although the modification is designed to enhance red objects, I was very excited to see how well the new camera performed - even on this predominantly blue target. Additionally, the camera picked up a great deal of red in many of the stars, as well as some very subtle red in portions of the dust. I'm very excited about the potential the new camera shows. This image won 1st place in Digital Astro's Challenge Photo - Star Cluster category for December 2011. This image also earned 2nd place in Astrophotogallery.org's December 2011 "Easy-Open Cluster" category.