Ecliptic Voyage

The Great Orion Nebula (Messier 42)   Located below Orion's belt in the constellation of Orion, the Great Orion Nebula is the brightest nebula visible in the night sky.  Even under light polluted skies, M42 can be seen with only a modest set of Binoculars (try it out if you haven't yet). The Orion constellation: 1/11/2021 at 10:45PM EST from SE MI The Constellation of Orion can be found during the winter months by looking south. As of today, January 11th, it will be visible in the south-east after sunset, reach its highest directly south at 11pm, and begin to set in the West just past 2:30am (for those of you in or near Michigan). I usually look for the 3 stars in a line that make up Orion's belt along with the two much brighter stars Betelgeuse (above the belt) and Rigel (below the belt).

Type: Open star cluster Age: ~100 million years Distance: 444 ly Also Known As: The Seven Sisters Michigan has been very cloudy over the past few months and I haven’t had many opportunities to be out imaging. I was however able to record some data on the Pleiades star cluster. I did not capture as much time on this target as I normally would like but I think it turned out good considering the constant parade of clouds lately. M45 is one of the closest star clusters to Earth and is easy to spot in the night sky. To me, this is easy to spot even from my light polluted back yard as it looks like a smudge in the sky. Pointing binoculars or a scope at it reveals the blueish stars that form the Pleiades. There is some blueish cloudiness to this cluster (reflection nebula) that was initially thought to be dust left over from the formation of the stars, but it is now believed to be an unrelated dust cloud in the interstellar medium; dust in between the star cluster and Earth that is sc