The Eye of the Bull

Two open starclusters: to the centre left- The Hyades and to the top right - The Pleiades. Taken from our Backyard on the 20th January 2017 with my Canon 600D DSLR with EOS 18-55mm lens at f=45mm. on a Star Adventurer mount.

The large orange star is Aldebran - Alpha Tauri which is sitting amongst but infront of the Hyades as it is much closer to our Solar System than the stars that make up the Hyades Cluster.

I always think this part of the winter night sky is particularly beautiful especially when viewed with the naked eye.  If its clear tonight and you live in a light pollution free part of the Northern Hemisphere why dont you go outside and see if you can find these beautiful stars. Its free!

The Hyades also known as Melotte 25 or Collinder 50) is the nearest open cluster to the Solar System and one of the best-studied star clusters. The Hipparcos satellite, the Hubble Space Telescope, and infrared color–magnitude diagram fitting have been used to establish a distance of ~153 light years (47 parsecs) to the cluster center. The distances established by these three independent methods agree, thereby making the Hyades an important rung on the cosmic distance ladder. The cluster consists of a roughly spherical group of hundreds of stars sharing the same age, place of origin, chemical content, and motion through space. From the perspective of observers on Earth, the Hyades Cluster appears in the constellation Taurus, where its brightest stars form a "V" shape along with the still brighter red giant Aldebaran. However, Aldebaran is unrelated to the Hyades, as it is located much closer to Earth (hence its apparent brightness) and merely happens to lie along the same line of sight.
The five brightest member stars of the Hyades have all evolved away from the Main Sequence and now lie at the bottom of the giant branch  Four of these stars, with Bayer designations Gamma, Delta 1, Epsilon, and Theta Tauri, form an asterism that is traditionally identified as the head of Taurus the Bull. The other is Zeta 1 Tauri, which lies 2° further south. Epsilon Tauri, known as Ain (the "Bull's Eye"), has a gas giant exoplanet candidate, the first planet to be found in any open cluster.
The age of the Hyades is estimated to be about 625 million years. The cluster core, where stars are most densely packed, has a radius of 2.7 parsecs (corresponding to a diameter of 17.6 light years), and the cluster's tidal radius is 10 parsecs (corresponding to a diameter of 65 light years).  However, about one-third of confirmed member stars have been observed well outside this boundary, in the cluster's extended halo; these stars are probably in the process of escaping from its gravitational influence.
Credit: Wikipedia

In astronomy, the Pleiades  or Seven Sisters (Messier 45 or M45), is an open star cluster containing middle-aged, hot B-type stars located in the constellation of Taurus. It is among the nearest star clusters to Earth and is the cluster most obvious to the naked eye in the night sky.
The cluster is dominated by hot blue and extremely luminous stars that have formed within the last 100 million years. Dust that forms a faint reflection nebulosity around the brightest stars was thought at first to be left over from the formation of the cluster (hence the alternative name Maia Nebula after the star Maia), but is now known to be an unrelated dust cloud in the interstellar medium, through which the stars are currently passing. Computer simulations have shown that the Pleiades was probably formed from a compact configuration that resembled the Orion Nebula.  Astronomers estimate that the cluster will survive for about another 250 million years, after which it will disperse due to gravitational interactions with its galactic neighborhood^{.
Credit: Wikipedia}


There has been some argument as to the distance of the Pleiades from our Solar System but most recent research would imply a distance of  136.2 parsecs or 444 light years.