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The Pleiades

Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade,

Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid.

- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1837-8, Locksley Hall

The Pleiades

(C) Copyright Anglo-Australian Observatory / Royal Observatory, Edinburgh.
Permission required for use. Photography by David Malin.

The Pleiades star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters and Messier 45, is a conspicuous object in the night sky with a prominent place in ancient mythology. The cluster contains hundreds of stars, of which only a handful are commonly visible to the unaided eye. The stars in the Pleiades are thought to have formed together around 100 million years ago, making them 1/50th the age of our sun, and they lie some 130 parsecs (425 light years) away. From our perspective they appear in the constellation of Taurus, with approximate celestial coordinates of 3 hours 47 minutes right ascension and +24 degrees declination. For northern hemisphere viewers, the cluster is above and to the right of Orion the Hunter as one faces south, and it transits -- reaches its highest point in the sky, midway between rising and setting -- around 4am in September, midnight in November, and 8pm in January.

XEphem charts showing the cluster's position. Left: a 90-degree star field centered on the Pleiades;
north is up and east is to the left. Right: same field with the cluster marked (as M45), as well as
constellations and the celestial and Galactic equators (red solid and dashed lines, respectively).

The image at the top of the page shows the central part of the cluster, where the brightest stars are found. This color photograph was taken in three filters, each exposed for about a half-hour, by David Malin with the UK Schmidt Telescope. The image is roughly 1.5 degrees wide, or three times the angular diameter of the moon. North is up and east is to the left. The cluster distance of 130 parsecs makes the physical width of the picture about 3.4 parsecs (11 light years); the cluster itself has a width perhaps 10 times greater, but most of the bright stars are found within one or two degrees of the core.

Brightest Pleiads

The figure at right, covering a somewhat larger area than the AAO photograph, shows the brightest stars in the vicinity, most of which are members of the Pleiades cluster (some appear in the same part of the sky but actually lie at a different distance). Data for these stars are listed in a table below. All stars selected have magnitudes of 6.5 or brighter, which is about the limit of human vision under ideal conditions -- how many you actually see depends on your own eyesight, local atmospheric transparency, and light pollution levels. While few people can see stars as faint as magnitude 6.5, this limit is interesting for a different reason: it includes all stars in the vicinity that are listed in the 1725 British Catalogue of John Flamsteed, the first British Astronomer Royal. In a crude fashion, Flamsteed's stars correspond to the best the eye can do. The Greek-letter designations in Johann Bayer's 1603 Uranometria are also commonly used to label visible stars, but Bayer's catalog doesn't go as faint as Flamsteed's, and consequently only the brightest Pleiad has a Bayer designation.

The following table lists the bright stars in order from west to east (right to left in the figures above), giving the name, Bayer and Flamsteed designations where applicable. More modern Henry Draper catalog numbers are also given, in addition to apparent visual magnitude, spectral type, and cluster membership status. Additional information on each star is available by selecting the appropriate link (Note: the linked data may not be accessible to all users; if you do not seem to have access, consult this SIMBAD page for more information).

(a plain-format table is available for those who can't parse HTML Tables)

Name

Bayer / Flamsteed

V mag

Spectral Type

Mem?

More

Celæno

16 Tauri

23288

5.46

B7 IV

variable

Yes

The Pleiades

Brightest Pleiads

Reflection Nebula

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