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Orion Dominating the Winter sky in the Northern Hemisphere, Orion is probably the most recognisable of constellations. It is full of very important and popular astronomy objects and stars. The image here is a stack of 80 x 80 second exposures at F4 and ISO 800 taken in January 2020 from my backyard in Nottingham with a modified Canon 1100D and a 50mm lens. The camera followed the sky with a Star Adventurer tracker. It was cold and windy at the time I took the exposures. I stacked them with Deep Sky Stacker and processed with PixInsight and Photoshop. You can see the arc of Barnard’s Loop and The Orion Nebula and Horsehead Nebula. Also visible glowing faintly to the bottom right is the ghostly outline of the Witch Head Nebula. Orion Below is the annotated version showing many of the interesting stars and objects within Orion. Very obvious is…

Introduction M45 – The Pleiades Presented here is M45, the famous Pleiades Open Cluster of stars. Image was captured in one imaging run on the night of 18th December 2019. This image shows a small sub-section of The Pleiades, the “head”. This main triangle shape of the bright stars Maia, Electra and Taygeta is visible to the naked eye. Known since ancient times from cultures all over the world and even featured in prehistoric cave paintings, The Pleiades is a large, open cluster of stars in Taurus, visible late autumn and winter in the Northern Hemisphere The Pleiades are actually composed of hundreds of stars, about 470 light years away. The cluster is vert young, about 20 million years, and is moving through a cloud of interstellar gas and dust. At some point many millions of years in the future, the stars will lose their mutual gravitational attraction an d will…