Evolution blog: How I discovered the Pleiades constellation

16 April 2023

How I discovered the Pleiades constellation

I know Orion and Ursa Major (Great Bear), but that's about it. Today I discovered the Pleiades, also known as The Seven Sisters, because they happened to be close to Venus!

Pleiades 13 April 2023 21:41 local time NL
photographed with Sony RX10-iv ©GK

I found them with my binoculars. But in a clear sky they can also be spotted with the naked eye. They stand out because they are bright stars close together in a small group. They look a little bit like the Great Bear. When I first spotted the group I didn't know the name. After consulting a few star maps and checking out the relative positions of the stars I decided they must be the Pleiades. I got the names of the individual stars from Wikipedia and added them to the picture above. My picture appears as if rotated about 60 degrees clockwise relative to the Wikipedia Pleiades. I guess it must be explained by the time of observation.

Pleiades (source)

If they are so easy to recognize, why didn't I know the Pleiades? I discovered them because they happened to be close to Venus! (at this time of the year). And Venus is a mighty bright 'star' in the western sky. That's how I discovered the Pleiades! The Pleiades have been known to humanity for thousands of years. That makes them special.


Venus + Pleiades. 13 April 2023

Venus + Pleiades. 12 April 2023
cloudy sky

The day before, 12 April 2023, the weather was cloudy and the effect was that only the brightest stars were visible. Paradoxically, that makes it easier to identify the constellation.

It is also nice to see that Venus is many times larger than the stars of the Pleiades. Venus is about the size of our Earth. On my picture the bright stars are about 8 pixels wide and Venus 65 pixels. So with this magnification Venus really is captured as a disc, not a dot. Of course these are amateurish pictures. However, they show that astrophotography can be fun without professional astronomical equipment.