Commonly called the Pleiades or Seven Sisters, M45 is known as an open star cluster. It contains over a thousand stars that are loosely bound by gravity, but it is visually dominated by a handful of its brightest members.
One of these stars, Merope, is located just to the upper right. The colorful rays of light at the upper right, emanating from this star are an optical phenomenon produced within the telescope.
The nearly straight, blue-white wisps pointing toward the upper right are streams of large dust particles. As the cloud moves toward Merope, its smaller dust particles are slowed down by the star’s radiation pressure more than the larger particles are. The large dust particles continue on toward the star while the smaller particles are left behind at the lower left of the picture.
M45 is located an estimated distance of 445 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus.
One of my more earlier pieces of work that needs to be retaken.
This is not a good image, but it taught me a lot.
Equipment Used:
Williams Optics Redcat 71
ASI ZWO240MC Pro OSC
Dual Narrowband Filter
ZWO AM5
The image was processed using Siril.