Photo of the Week for January 13, 2017

Cold January evenings bring with them a dazzling display of bright constellations. The winter groups are rich with deep-sky wonders, too. Among them is the incomparable Pleiades cluster (M45), in Taurus. Also known as the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades is arguably the finest open cluster in the entire sky. M45 is easy to spot with the naked eye and is a superb binocular object. It’s also delightfully photogenic. Long-exposure photographs like this one show the cluster stars enmeshed in a diaphanous cloud of interstellar dust.

This remarkably detailed portrait was captured by Oleg Bouevitch from his backyard in Ottawa, Ontario. He used a Takahashi FSQ-106EDX III f/5 astrographic telescope and Atik 383L+ CCD camera to acquire a total of 310 minutes imaging data shot through red, green and blue filters.