M45 - Seven Sisters or Pleiades - Deep Sky Videos

So first of all John we've come all this way to your incredible telescope over there There's your telescope and yet we're outside with a pair of binoculars. What's going on here? Why are we doing this? Well, some objects just are too big to get into a telescope field of view You really need lower magnification and the binoculars are an ideal means of doing that you know, we look at the sky because of the beauty of it as well as as the science of it and Certainly through binoculars the Pleiades are a beautiful object to look at Well, this is one of my favorite images of one of my favorite Messier objects This is the Pleiades or seven sisters Messier 45 and it's a beautiful object to look at It's really easy to locate this object in the night sky You just find the belt of Orion follow the belt stars up and to the right They point to a bright orange star, which is Aldebaran keep the line going and eventually you end up at the Pleiades open cluster The Pleiades is not only an open cluster, which means it's a group of stars But it's what we call a reflection nebula. And so the Pleiades was formed something like a hundred million years ago. So it's Relatively young and it's not very young It's relatively young in terms of the populations of clusters in the Milky Way So globular clusters are billions of years old open clusters like Orion nebula and 42 and the Pleiades are much younger Variations on a dark autumn winter night when the cluster is above the horizon. It really vies for your attention It's a bit like diamonds scattered on black velvet That's why I always describe it with the naked eye if you stare at the Pleiades That's when things start to get quite interesting because seven sisters probably gives away how many stars you're supposed to see there It's about the brightest and prettiest star cluster in the northern sky or even in in the sky as a whole At the moment It's just up there if you go up from Venus about as far as Jupiter is down You'll see something shimmering in the dark. I can see them. We can't see them with the camera It's known as seven sisters, even though it's clearly not more than seven stars in the cluster There's maybe a thousand stars all together the ones you can see the naked eye Tend to be there's all six pretty bright ones and one which is borderline in terms of where you can see it or not What tends to happen as you're studying the cluster? It's like your eyesight gets dragged into it and suddenly you start to pick out these other stars So it's well worth if you can see them just having time out and staring at them. See how many you can see Where things start to get really interesting though is when you use a pair of binoculars I think binoculars really bring out the best of this cluster What are you seeing compared with what you saw without? Oh, I can see lots and lots of stars. I can see about a dozen fairly bright stars And then in the background Dozens and dozens more when you see a photograph like this This is actually a long exposure photograph taken with a digital SLR camera in this case I think this was a five minute exposure and it's a single exposure You'd normally if you're doing astrophotography you take lots and lots of exposures and stack them together But the Pleiades is actually quite a bright object and here I've been lazy and I've just taken a single exposure And you can see that as well as all the cluster stars There's also a lot of material around those stars as well. Most of the stuff between the stars is gas And it can be kind of cold or hot or whatever but there's other stuff which is dust It's a bit like soot and like soot it kind of scatters the light And right now the reason the Pleiades is what we call a refraction nebula is it's passing through a region of dust and gas You can see hopefully around certainly this one here This is my rope this kind of wispy wispy material kind of almost a ghost like image And so this is where the light from the star is kind of hitting bits of dust and it's then being scattered off that dust Towards us. Can I have a turn? Yep. Sure. Do you want to be cameraman? Yep. There you go. Look at Venus Oh, yeah. Okay now go up from Venus. Yep Up from Venus as far as Jupiter is below Venus. Yeah, and then move to the left. Oh, yeah, and you'll get it Oh, yeah, I thought oh, this is a bit disappointing and then suddenly I hit them. I was looking at the wrong thing. Oh Yeah Yeah, you do see kind of really brightly the Those main ones and then you see all the other ones sort of resolving as well I didn't see any gas when I was using though You wouldn't you wouldn't see it unless you had a long exposure photograph naked eye visibility doesn't show it But if you do the right exposure for the long enough time, you can't pick out that nebulosity the seven sisters will at some point in the near future become the six sisters because although it won't blow up with the supernova the Biggest one of them is not long for this life It will kind of fade away Too soon as a white dwarf star and so eventually the bright seven sisters will become six and the five and so on They will basically all go And in the coming, you know millions of years. It's not gonna happen anytime soon. The seven sisters in mythology were Hounded by Orion. He was after their favors That's the best way to describe it and they were getting a bit fed up with Orion's attention so basically what happened was the gods turned the sisters into doves and the word playa means doves and That's why they're up in the night sky In fact, the sisters are there with their mom and dad as well because Atlas and play only they were the parents of the sisters Are the two stars at the front of the cluster looking after their daughters? I want to show you a bit of a different picture of m45 and you're probably wondering how I can do it in a little Room like this, so I better tell you where I am first I'm at the Isaac Newton telescope at La Palma and this is actually called the plate library. These are copies of glass photographic plates from previous surveys of the sky that have been done around the world kind of like Maps of space where they've taken lots and lots and lots of pictures of space and then they got all these glass Prints of them and they made copies of them here onto this kind of plastic material and People at other telescopes like the one we're at now can use them kind of as a road map so they can have a look Around space figure out what they were looking for what to point at and here. It's probably quite familiar to most people That's our Messier object This is obviously a negative and that's why we're not seeing it in the usual black of space with all the white and blue stars We're seeing it the other way around we're seeing it all white with black stars But there you go And I find it quite funny that we're here in this room and above our head about two or three floors Is the Isaac Newton telescope doing modern astronomy a couple of floors below here in this little room? Is a little bit of a memento of old-fashioned astronomy If you'd like to look at a few more pictures from and behind the scenes on our videos you can go along to our Flickr page There's always a bunch there we're also on Facebook with regular updates about what's going on and Social media animals we are there we are on Twitter as well But of course the best thing you can do is always go along to YouTube and press the all-important subscribe button Then you'll find out about every video. 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