Star Vistas

Messier was a French amateur comet hunter active in the 1700s who made a list of “annoying” celestial objects that could possibly be mistaken for comets!  As these “vermin of the skies”, as he referred to them, did not change their positions in the night sky they were clearly not comets, and thus were to be ignored.  Many of these “vermin” however are very beautiful deep-sky objects worthy of our imaging time.  Messier object 45, the 45th entry in Messier’s catalogue is the Pleiades open star cluster in Taurus.