Pleiades (Messier 45)
My field of view was too small to fit in the open cluster Pleiades (Messier 45).
The solution was to build a mosaic of four tiles.
Total exposure: 4hrs 40mins.
224 x 75 with RGB filters
Here is my visual plan in advance of shooting the mosaic. This was quite fiddly to execute because the rotation of the camera was critical. My tip here is to make sure they overlap by around 20% to allow for error - you can see the overlaps in the test. The last thing you want is disjointed panels creating a black hole in the middle of your mosaic. It would be similar to one of those black holes in space… there’s no way back from it.
Pleiades, also known as ‘The Seven Sisters’ is beautiful and jewel-like. The first person to look at it through a telescope and record what he saw was Galileo. He published a sketch of what he saw in a book called Siderius Nuncius, meaning ‘Starry Messenger’. I like to believe that when he first saw Pleiades through his eyepiece he shouted ‘caspita!’ meaning ‘wow!’ which is what I said.
