03 M45 Pleiades

Description

This is a zoom in on Messier 45, or Pleiades open star cluster. Taken by a Panasonic DMC-TZ10 camera on a small tripod, without a telescope, it shows the brightmost stars of the Seven Sisters, or Pleiades, star cluster around 444 light years from the Earth. Known as Subaru in Japan, th ecluster contains at least a 1000 relatively young stars (around 100 million years, give or take a few ;-).