Seven Sisters Star Cluster

The Seven Sisters star cluster, also known as the Pleiades, consists of many, young, bright and hot stars. While the cluster contains hundreds of stars it is so named because only seven are typically visible to the naked eye. The Seven Sisters is visible from the northern hemisphere, and resides in the constellation Taurus.

[div class=attrib]Image and supporting text courtesy of Davide De Martin over at Skyfactory.[end-div]

This image is a composite from black and white images taken with the Palomar Observatory’s 48-inch (1.2-meter) Samuel Oschin Telescope as a part of the second National Geographic Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS II). The images were recorded on two type of glass photographic plates – one sensitive to red light and the other to blue and later they were digitized. Credit: Caltech, Palomar Observatory, Digitized Sky Survey.

In order to produce the color image seen here, I worked with data coming from 2 different photographic plates taken in 1986 and 1989. Original file is 10.252 x 9.735 pixels with a resolution of about 1 arcsec per pixel. The image shows an area of sky large 2,7° x 2,7° (for comparison, the full-Moon is about 0,5° in diameter).

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]