movements turn a fixed cluster into what looks like a hovering, drifting object. Add the fact that it does not match the steady straight-line track of a satellite, and a reasonable person lands on a reasonable-seeming wrong answer. It’s the same instinct that makes us stop and wonder about the white trails stretching behind airplanes.
What You Are Actually Seeing, 440 Light Years Away
The Pleiades is an open star cluster in the constellation Taurus, sitting roughly 440 light years from Earth. Sources put the figure slightly differently, some closer to 444 light years, which is why it is fairer to say “about 440” than to quote a single hard number. Either way, the light reaching your eye tonight left those stars centuries ago.
Astronomers catalogue it as Messier 45, or M45, though most people know it as the Seven Sisters. Despite that name, the cluster contains far more than
