Here's an image I took on Saturday night. It's a star cluster called The Pleiades, and is easily visible as a tight pattern of stars even to the naked eye. It looks a little bit like a tiny dipper. I remember that when I was a kid, my friend and neighbor Dan Saar would observe with me, and he was always able to see the individual stars in the pattern. I couldn't back then without the telescope, but I can now...thanks to the wonder of laser surgery, which corrected my vision 7 years ago.
The Pleiades is known was the Seven Sisters in many ancient cultures, and there is a lot of underlying mythology which makes this asterism especially interesting. Strangely enough, only six stars are visible, but many independent cultures named them as seven sisters. Nobody really has determined with certainty what happened to sister #7, although there have been plenty of proposals.
Anyway as a stargazer I feel like a fortunate man because on many nights the seven sisters have kept me company :-)
As can be seen in the photo, a fair amount of nebulosity surrounds the stars in the Pleiades. These stars are young, hot stars and their blue light is reflecting off the material surrounding them.
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