The Meteor and The Pleiades Star Cluster: View from Saudi Arabia
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Sometimes even the sky surprises you. To see more stars and faint nebulosity in the Pleiades star cluster (M45), long exposures are made. Many times, other interesting items appear on the exposures that were not intended—but later edited out. These include stuck pixels, cosmic ray hits, frames with bright clouds or Earth's Moon, airplane trails, lens flares, faint satellite trails, and even insect trails. Sometimes, though, something really interesting is caught by chance. This was the case a few weeks ago in al-Ula, Saudi Arabia when a bright meteor streaked across during an hour-long exposure of the Pleiades. Along with the famous bright blue stars, less famous and less bright blue stars, and blue-reflecting dust surrounding the star cluster, the fast rock fragment created a distinctive green glow, likely due to vaporized metals.
This very bright open star cluster has a large angular extent, making it a great binocular object. If you viewed this object through a large telescope, you would only see a few stars, not the entire cluster. Perhaps the most famous open cluster, this is easily visible with the naked eye.
Saudi Arabia, officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is a country in West Asia. Located in the center of the Middle East, it covers the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula. It is the fifth-largest country in Asia, the largest in the Middle East, and the twelfth-largest in the world. It is bordered by the Red Sea to the west; Jordan, Iraq, and Kuwait to the north; the Persian Gulf, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to the east; Oman to the southeast; and Yemen to the south.
#NASA #Space #Astronomy #Science #Earth #Meteors #Stars #StarClusters #ThePleiades #SevenSisters #Messier45 #M45 #OpenStarCluster #BrownDwarfStars #Taurus #Constellation #Cosmos #Universe #Astrophotography #YousifAlqasimi #EssaAlJasmi #Astrophotographers #alUla #SaudiArabia #WestAsia #GSFC #UnitedStates #STEM #Education #APoD
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