Deep Sky · 1 of 5

The Pleiades

How many of the Pleiades can you count with your own eyes?

A thousand stars 444 light-years away, six of which you can see without moving from your doorstep.

You’ll be able to find the Pleiades, and count how many of its stars your sky shows.

10 steps · about 8 min

Before this: Orion: The Hunter (6 min)

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That small, misty knot is the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, the best-known star cluster in the sky. Seven is the name, not the count. With nothing but your eyes, how many do most people see?

When Orion is up, start at Orion's Belt: take it north-west — up and to the right, from the northern hemisphere — to Aldebaran, unmistakably orange, in the V-shaped face of Taurus. It looks part of that V, and the tags say it is not: two things in a line are not two things in a place.

The Belt to Aldebaran, from Orion: The Hunter

Turn the V sideways: Aldebaran stops less than halfway, and the rest stack up together. The V is a cluster too: the Hyades, three times closer than the Pleiades and about six times older — the Pleiades in half a billion years.

Carry on the same way past Aldebaran, another 14°, a fist and a half, to a small knot of blue-white stars: first a smudge, then a cluster, then something you can never un-see. This is , the Pleiades.

The ring is the bright core, 1.8° across, nearly four Moons — binoculars beat a telescope. The line traces a tiny dipper, not the Little Dipper: that one hangs from Polaris. All born 110 million years ago, with the dinosaurs; in half a billion more they will be as old, and as loose, as the Hyades.

Sort the cluster: colour across, up, against every star of known distance. The Pleiades land on one band: blue, bright and young, born of one cloud.

Colour against true brightness, from The Winter Hexagon

Count them under this suburban sky, and tap your number: the next step darkens the sky and gives the answer. The classic naked-eye test, honest about your sky and your eyes at once — count again after twenty minutes in the dark.

Most people count six: five sisters and their father, Atlas, at the east end; a rural sky gives eight or nine. Greek, Lakota and Aboriginal Australian stories see sisters here; Japan calls them Subaru, the gathering. More in The Sisters and the Hunter.

At +24°, the Pleiades are seen from every inhabited place on Earth; run eight hours to watch them cross the sky. Their first rising before dawn kept calendars for many peoples — The Star That Brought the Flood shows why.

The route, and where it ends: a cluster still young. Next time Orion is up, hop it yourself.

Orion's Belt, north-west to Aldebaran
On another 14° to the Pleiades
Born together 110 million years ago

The Pleiades

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