The Pleiades Star Cluster in Taurus: A Smart Telescope View from Canary Islands
Astrophotographer "Project Nightflight": "Only a few decades ago astrophotographers would go to great lengths for shooting widefield images of deep sky objects. The typical setup was made of a film camera riding piggyback on a telescope or a simple barn door tracker. After developing the film one would hope that the stars didn’t trail too much during the exposure and some nebulosity, e.g. the Merope nebula, had left a subtle impression on the negative. Today, with the wide availability of smart telescopes, everything has changed. Devices like the Seestar or Dwarf scopes are set up easily, go to the imaging object all by themselves, patiently collect the data, stack the images and even develop the final image. The results rival the pictures in any astronomy textbook. This image of the Plejades was shot with a Seestar S30P from La Palma island with less than 1 hour exposure time, the result shown here came directly out of the App."
The Pleiades are one of the finest and nearest examples of a reflection nebula associated with a cluster of young stars. The cluster itself is a group of many hundreds of stars about 400 light years away in the direction of the northern constellation of Taurus. A handful of the brightest stars cluster together in space and have been recognized as a group since ancient times. However, even the brightest of the Pleiades stars (Alcyone, apparent visual mag +2.9) is relatively faint and would be inconspicuous (and nameless) if it were not a member of the cluster The faintest named star is Asterope, (V = +5.8), close to the threshold of naked eye visibility. All the visible stars of the Pleiades are in reality much more luminous than the Sun.
The nebulosity seen here is light reflected from the particles in a cloud of cold gas and dust this cluster has drifted into. It appears blue because these tiny motes of interstellar dust scatter blue light more efficiently than the longer wavelengths of red light, and it is streaky because of the distribution of dust particles in space.
In western literature and legend, the stars bear the names of the Seven Sisters, the daughters of Atlas and Pleone. They were also half-sisters to the goddesses of the nearby Hyades stars. The delicate beauty of the stars identified them as a group of women in many cultures, from Australian Aborigine to Native American. To the Japanese they are 'Subaru', a conglomerate or collection (i.e. cluster), while Chinese legends refer to a swarm of bees. Maori and Pacific Islands people often called the Pleiades 'Matariki', the star cluster that heralds the start of the Maori New Year.
La Palma, also known as La isla bonita, and historically as San Miguel de La Palma, is the most northwesterly island of the Canary Islands, a Spanish autonomous community and archipelago in Macaronesia in the North Atlantic Ocean.
Location: La Palma, Canary Islands (Spain)
Photographer's website: https://project-nightflight.net
Date: Oct. 23, 2026
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