brightness changes tagged posts

This image from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft shows members of the Pleiades star cluster taken during Campaign 4 of the K2 Mission. The cluster stretches across two of the 42 charge-coupled devices (CCDs) that make up Kepler’s 95 megapixel camera. The brightest stars in the cluster – Alcyone, Atlas, Electra, Maia, Merope, Taygeta, and Pleione – are visible to the naked eye. Kepler was not designed to look at stars this bright; they cause the camera to saturate, leading to long spikes and other artefacts in the image. Despite this serious image degradation, the new technique has allowed astronomers to carefully measure changes in brightness of these stars as the Kepler telescope observed them for almost three months. Credit: NASA / Aarhus University / T. White