Tonight marks the start of a brand-new long-term project: a deep, high-resolution exploration of M45 — The Pleiades.
It’s one of the most iconic objects in the night sky, but beneath the bright blue stars is an incredible world of hidden dust, faint reflection nebulosity, and intricate filaments that only reveal themselves with serious integration time.
My plan is to push this target much deeper than my usual widefield attempts. I want to pull out the delicate, smoky dust lanes surrounding the cluster — the parts that often get lost or clipped in shorter exposures. With enough hours, the Pleiades transforms from a star cluster into a drifting cloud of ancient interstellar material, carved and illuminated by starlight.
The goal for this project is:
✨ Project Goals
- Capture fine dust detail in the Merope and Maia regions
- Reveal the faint outer reflection nebulosity that makes M45 so dramatic
- Produce a clean, natural-colour broadband image with strong contrast
- Build a dataset with enough depth to withstand high-resolution processing
- Create a final piece worthy of printing and adding to my Eternal Skies portfolio
This will be a multi-night capture, spread over as many clear opportunities as the weather allows (so… we’ll see what the UK has planned). I’ll be sharing updates as the data builds and the image takes shape.
It’s always exciting starting something new — especially a target as beautifully complex as the Pleiades. Time to chase the dust.
Clear skies ✨