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Credit & Copyright: Dheera Venkatraman
Explanation:
Stars come in bunches.
The most famous bunch of stars on the sky is
the Pleiades, a
bright cluster that can be easily seen with the
unaided eye.
The Pleiades lies only about 450
light years away, formed about 100 million years ago,
and will likely last about another 250 million years.
Our Sun was likely born in a
star cluster,
but now, being about 4.5 billion years old, its
stellar
birth companions have long since dispersed.
The Pleiades star cluster is pictured over
Half Dome,
a famous rock structure in
Yosemite National Park in
California,
USA.
The featured image is a composite of 28 foreground exposures and
174 images of the stellar background,
all taken from the same location and by the same camera
on the same night in October 2019.
After calculating
the timing of a future juxtaposition of the
Pleiades and
Half Dome,
the astrophotrographer was unexpectedly rewarded by an
electrical blackout, making the
background sky unusually
dark.
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NASA Web Site Statements, Warnings, and Disclaimers
NASA Official: Jay Norris. Specific rights apply.
A service of: LHEA at NASA / GSFC
& Michigan Tech. U.
Based on Astronomy Picture
Of the Day
Publications with keywords: pleiades
Publications with words: pleiades
See also: