Written by Mahmoud Ragheb Friday, November 24, 2023 02:30 AM
Watching a cluster of stars chandelier -The Seven Sisters- during the nights of November in the skies of Egypt and the Arab world, and everywhere from the North Pole to the furthest point in South America.
And revealed Astronomical Society In Jeddah, in its report, the Pleiades are currently observed low on the eastern horizon some time after the beginning of the night, and they reach high in the sky at midnight and descend towards the west before dawn, just like the sun during the day, and this is an apparent movement due to the Earth’s rotation around its axis.
The Pleiades cluster resembles the stars of Ursa Minor, except that it is blurry in appearance, and its location can be easily determined using the stars of Orion. When an imaginary line is drawn from the three stars in Orion in the opposite direction to Sirius, we will reach a bright red star called Aldebaran, and near this star there is The Pleiades cluster. There is a need to use binoculars to see this cluster from within cities due to light pollution.
The Pleiades is an open star cluster containing approximately 500 stars. According to modern measurements, the Pleiades was born from the same cloud of gas and dust only about 100 million years ago, compared to the age of the Sun, which is 4 and a half billion years.
The Pleiades stars, bound together by gravitational exchange, are 430 light-years from Earth, and these seven sisters hurtle together through space, many of them thousands of times brighter than the Sun.
When taking pictures of this cluster, a trace of the nebula from which these stars were formed will appear, and through binoculars one will see many more stars than the Seven Sisters, and through a large telescope one can see some nebulous material around the stars.
In general, the Pleiades cluster appears above the eastern horizon before Aldebaran and sets before it. The only exception to this rule will be for those living in southern latitudes (south of the equator), where the Pleiades rises shortly after Aldebaran rises.
For us in the Northern Hemisphere, the Pleiades cluster is associated with winter, although it will be observed in the evening sky from now until April 2024.
It is worth noting that the Pleiades star cluster will be visible throughout the night coinciding with the late fall season and the transition towards winter in the northern hemisphere. This cluster can easily be imagined as a frozen smudge on the dome of the night sky.
