Pleiades Star Cluster M45

This is a slightly larger version of the Pleiades cluster I used as the background in my recent piece “The Daughters of Atlas” see: fav.me/d6g59fd

I’m offering this as a stock image for anyone who wishes to use it, but please respect my hours of work that went into producing this image and be sure to credit me. If you do use this, please credit me, link back to this page, and if you can drop me a note, I’d love to see what you did!

Conditions of use:
You can NOT use this image in any commissioned work or other commercial product without direct permission from me.
You CAN use this image in any deviations you want to make available as prints, provided they are only sold as deviant prints like most artists do here.
You MUST credit me and link back to either this or my main page from any deviation you use the image in.

The Pleiades (M45) is an open cluster in the constellation of Taurus and is about 100 million years old. The reflection nebula is mostly composed of dust from the interstellar medium through which the cluster of stars is moving and is unrelated to the stars formation process. The cluster contains over 1,000 confirmed members and weighs approximately 800 solar masses. I did this image entirely in Photoshop. I decided right from the start to make the cluster as close to the real thing as I could. I began by accurately mapping the stars onto a canvas, basically dotting where every star needed to be. The nebula was then painted in by hand using my own set of nebula brushes based mostly on cloud textures. I used several web-based Pleiades images as my guide, including the one found here fav.me/d6fgbo5

U-