It was a beautiful evening and I just had to shoot the Pleiades (M45) from my new dark sky site.  They just looked too good from there.

I wanted see how much I could pick up with the unmodified Canon T3.  It is definitely a camera that is sensitive to blues and cyan.  It does comets and galaxies well enough.  It is not as good as a modified camera on nebulae, unless its a reflection nebula like M45.

This is about 2.58 hours of integration – about the minimum needed to bring out that faint background nebulousity I’ve always tried to get.  It is difficult to decern the true background if there are any gradients, unfortunately.  There were a some here and I tried my best to minimize them.   Towards the end of the set, M45 moved into the muck and a little LP from a small neighborhood to my northwest.  Plus, the zodiacal light was contributing a gradient, too.   It was interesting to see that, though.  🙂

Below is the normal orientation for M45 with some noise reduction thrown in.  I didn’t do any to the first image.  That was pretty much how it came out after stacking.

And finally, the gaudy, maxed out version:

🙂