Photo of the Week for April 20, 2018
Spring has truly arrived when the constellations of winter hang low in the west during evening twilight.
Included in that collection is Taurus, home to the lovely Pleiades open cluster. Also known as the Seven Sisters and catalogued as M45, the Pleiades cluster is unquestionably one of the finest deep-sky objects in the entire heavens for observers using binoculars or a small, wide-field telescope. Long-exposure photographs, such as the one presented above, show the cluster stars enmeshed in a patch of interstellar dust that the Pleiades are drifting through.
Calgary, Alberta, astrophotographer Dan Chervenka made this Pleiades portrait with images he acquired at the 2017 Saskatchewan Summer Star Party, held annually at Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park. Dan combined six, 300-second exposures shot at ISO 800 with a Nikon D750 DSLR camera and Sky-Watcher Esprit 100 f/5.5 refractor telescope.
