Venus and the Seven Sisters

A glorious sight in my 75mm APO refractor telescope last night. The night of April 3rd was cloudy when Venus was nicely in the main cluster, but I was still able to get both Venus and the Pleiades in the same field of view last night.

Venus is massively over-exposed here, but I like the effect of the burn-out and spikes it causes. You can just see the faint nebulosity around the main stars in the Pleiades. This image is the result of stacking 20 exposures each of 20 seconds using my ATIK 383L CCD camera and a white luminance filter – through the Pentax 75 APO.