                        Astronomy Picture of the Day

    Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our
      fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation
                    written by a professional astronomer.

                               2025 January 27
     A cluster of bright blue stars is seen on the upper right while an
    unusual dome-like mountain occupies most of the frame. Please see the
                 explanation for more detailed information.

                           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 astrophotographer was unexpectedly rewarded by an
   electrical blackout, making the background sky unusually dark.

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