Shortly after the clock struck midnight and we started a new day on October 12, 2020 I sat on a step ladder at the eyepiece of my 6" Omni XLT Newtonian telescope with the 32mm eyepeiece to get a view and sketch of the open cluster M45. This beautiful open cluster shows some brilliant blue stars at the eyepiece, but from my light polluted skies I was unable to make out any of the nebula you most likely have seen associated with this cluster.
For this sketch I used black canson paper, white charcoal pencil, eraser, kneaded eraser, and a blue pastel charcoal pencil to highlight some of the color that I was able to see in the stars. I used the kneaded eraser to dim some of the stars to give the sketch some dimension. I also made the brightest stars bigger than the dimmer stars to help represent how bright they were in the eyepiece.
M45 is around 444 light years away in the constellation Taurus, and has a diameter of about 35 light years. This cluster is full of young hot stars around 150 million years old. The stars are currently gravitationally locked, but is expected to break out of that gravitational bond in the next 250 million years as it drifts across the sky and makes its way towards the constellation of Orion.
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| M45 the Pleiades Open Cluster in Taurus |
For this sketch I used black canson paper, white charcoal pencil, eraser, kneaded eraser, and a blue pastel charcoal pencil to highlight some of the color that I was able to see in the stars. I used the kneaded eraser to dim some of the stars to give the sketch some dimension. I also made the brightest stars bigger than the dimmer stars to help represent how bright they were in the eyepiece.
If you would like more information on this cluster, and where it is located in the sky along with a time lapse of me sketching this at the eyepiece be sure to check out the video down below:
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