20 Seconds of M45

I wasn't really trying to get a good shot here as I was experimenting with "drift aligning" my scope (more on this later), but this is a close-up shot of M45 (aka "Pleiades" & "Seven sisters")...more specifically this is one of the stars that make up M45 named "Merope".

The stars that make up M45 are very visible to the naked eye during the East night sky and look great in binoculars. Only with long-exposure photography do the beautiful blue nebulosity around each of the main stars start to appear. This blue nebula is called a "reflection
nebula" which means that the light from the stars are either behind or within them, illuminating the nebula for us to see.

M45 is 440 light-years away from earth which comes to 2,580,906,240,000,000 miles. It would take us 440 years to get there if we could travel the speed of light (670,616,629 mph). The fastest manned vehicle to date has gone about 24,800 mph..which at that speed would take us over 11 MILLION years to get there......