Annotated Image of the Pleiades Star Cluster (VIDEO)
Caption
The Pleiades star cluster is a beautiful and familiar sight, as seen in this image from the second Palomar Observatory Sky Survey. NASA's Kepler space telescope was designed to look at faint stars, so images taken of the Pleiades show long spikes due to the camera becoming saturated by the brightest stars. Despite the image degradation, the continuous observations by Kepler over a period of almost three months have allowed astronomers to find fluctuations in the brightness of each star.
Credit
Credit: NASA / ESA / AURA / Caltech / Aarhus University / T. White
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