半圆顶上空的昴宿星团

2022年7月19日

Pleiades over Half Dome
Image Credit & Copyright: Dheera Venkatraman

Explanation: Stars come in bunches. The most famous bunch of stars on the sky is the Pleiades, a bright cluster that can be easily seen with the unaided eye. The Pleiades lies only about 450 light years away, formed about 100 million years ago, and will likely last about another 250 million years. Our Sun was likely born in a star cluster, but now, being about 4.5 billion years old, its stellar birth companions have long since dispersed. The Pleiades star cluster is pictured over Half Dome, a famous rock structure in Yosemite National Park in California, USA. The featured image is a composite of 28 foreground exposures and 174 images of the stellar background, all taken from the same location and by the same camera on the same night in October 2019. After calculating the timing of a future juxtaposition of the Pleiades and Half Dome, the astrophotrographer was unexpectedly rewarded by an electrical blackout, making the background sky unusually dark.

Tomorrow’s picture: webb of ring

半圆顶上空的昴宿星团
影像提供与版权: Dheera Venkatraman

说明: 恒星会抱团。地球天空中最著名的恒星聚落是昴宿星团，一个肉眼轻易可见的明亮星团。昴宿星团近在450光年之处，大约形成于1亿年前，恒星形成活动可能还会再持续约2.5亿年。我们的太阳当初很可能也是诞生于一个星团里，但如今太阳已45亿年高龄，其星团伙伴也早已分道扬镳。在上图里，昴宿星团悬在美国加州优胜美地国家公园著名岩块半圆顶的上方。这幅摄于2019年10月的主题影像，是由位在相同地点、相同相机在同一晚所拍摄的28张前景照片和174张背景恒星照片组合而成。在算好昴宿星团和半圆顶并列的时间之后，这位个天文摄影者还因突如其来的停电而获得额外的奖赏，因为背景天空变得格外的幽暗。

明日的图片: webb of ring