Gallery »  ⭐ The Winter Sky Sapphires

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Image © 2022 Jeremy Likness. All rights reserved.
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Image © 2022 Jeremy Likness. All rights reserved.
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My favorite signal of winter is the magical faint glow that glimmers in your peripheral vision but fades to a blur when you gaze head on. Magnification reveals several bright blue stars burrowing through long filaments of ionized gas and dust. The brightest of these are the famed Seven Sisters or Pleiades.
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Telescope:   Svbony sv503 70ED
Length:   336mm
Aperture:   70mm
F-stop:   f/4.56
Sessions:   4
Captured:   2022-02-22 to 2022-11-17
Lights:   162
Exposure:   300
Total exposure:   13 h
Ra:   3h 47m 40.1s
Dec:   +24° 03' 43.77
Size:   143.539 x 95.587 arcmin
Radius:   1.437 deg
Scale:   1.581 arcsec/pixel

Related images:

One of my favorite winter targets, the Pleiades are easily visible as a bright cluster of stars that resemble a 'tiny dipper.' You can see their faint bluish/purple glow with the naked eye and the Seven Sisters are photogenic and multiple focal lengths. This is a series of broadband RGB long exposures to bring out the subtle dust and nebulosity that surround this young group of stars.
A steady mount and extremely clear skies gave me the conditions I was waiting for to test long (3-minute) exposures. This is just 7 of them. I purposefully increased the saturation to make this an almost celebatory looking skyscape.
40 2-minute exposures in Bortle 5.
The Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, are visible to the naked eye, resolve in binoculars and can be captured by regular cameras. This is the first time I've collected enough exposure to capture the delicate nebulosity that surrounds these beautiful blue stars.
The Pleiades is one of the closest star clusters to Earth and filled with bright blue stars.
A long exposure reveals the wispy tendrils of nebulosity that surround the major stars in M45 like a cocoon.

Objects in frame:

M45 19 Tau 25 Tau Barnard's Merope Nebula IC349 Maia Nebula Merope Nebula NGC1432 NGC1435 Sterope I (21 Tau) The star 18 Tau The star Alcyone (η Tau) The star Asterope The star Atlas (27 Tau) The star Celaeno (16 Tau) The star Electra (17 Tau) The star Merope (23 Tau) The star Pleione (28 Tau) The star Sterope II (22 Tau) The star Taygeta (q Tau)
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