Pleiades

In astronomy, an open star cluster about 400 light years away from Earth in the constellation Taurus, represented as the Seven Sisters of Greek mythology. Its brightest stars (highly luminous, blue-white giants only a few million years old) are visible to the naked eye, but there are many fainter ones.

It is a young cluster, and the stars of the Pleiades are still surrounded by traces of the reflection nebula from which they formed, visible on long-exposure photographs.

The cluster contains about a dozen blue stars visible to the naked eye, spread over an area about twice that of the full moon. The six brightest stars are easily seen; the seventh is more difficult to see, and is supposed to represent the lost sister, Electra. It takes a clear sky to distinguish the next four or five. Binoculars show at least fifty stars and a telescope hundreds more.

According to Greek mythology the Pleiades were the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione of whom the eldest, Electra, was ‘lost’ because she married a mortal. Nine of the stars are named after the Seven Sisters and their parents: Alcyone, Maia, Electra, Merope, Taygeta, Celaeno, Asterope, Atlas, and Pleione.

Pleiades

In Greek mythology, the seven daughters of the giant Atlas who asked to be changed into a cluster of stars to escape the pursuit of the hunter Orion.