When I get frustrated at my slow progress, it is always good to slow down and remind myself that the main reason I started this WordPress blog was to document that very progress. I more or less had written off this Messier 45 short integration for a laundry list of reasons, but my friend, Dave, reminded me that I could always go back and try to reprocess the data for a better result. I might not spend anymore time on this particular set of uncalibrated subs, but I think I got most of the visual ring out of the frame (pervasive artifact I’m dealing with at the moment) and you can make out what the target is supposed to be even if I lost a lot of the nifty nebulosity around the brightest stars.

The Pleiades, or Seven Sisters (Messier 45), is an open star cluster in the constellation of Taurus. Its nine brightest stars are made up of the sisters Sterope, Merope, Electra, Maia, Taygeta, Celaeno, and Alcyone, along with their parents Atlas and Pleione.