Messier 45 the Seven Sisters star cluster and Pleiades Nebula (NGC 1432) is the best know star cluster in the world, with much folk lore surrounding it. It is said it can be used as an eye test or light pollution test. If you can see seven (realistically five or six) individual stars your eyes are good, and the light pollution is not that bad. The cluster is only 444 light years away, however the radius of the cluster is 20 light years.
In this one purposely left the stars in and processed them together - I wanted them big and brilliant. Normally I grab out the stars from the nebula, so they don't get overexposed as I stretch out the nebula in the histogram. Then I would normally process the stars separately and finally put them back in for the final photograph.
Bonus tip the starburst pattern you see in the stars is caused by the starlight getting diffracted as it strikes both the power cable and the USB cable of my astro-camera getting concentrated into spikes. If I had done a better job of curving the cables the light would have dispersed instead of "spiked".
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