Caption: Honourable mention in the 2022 IAU OAE Astrophotography Contest, category Still images of celestial patterns.   Taken in Dar Eid in Saint Catherine/Sinai, Egypt, in October 2021, this image shows the Pleiades, an open cluster also known as The Seven Sisters. The Pleiades are located in the north-western part of the constellation Taurus, the Bull. This constellation originates from ancient Babylonian or even Sumerian belief, where it was designated the Bull of Heaven, a mighty creature owned by the sky god. In Late Babylonian times, the Pleiades were called The Bristle at the hunchback of The Bull. In China, the asterism is also called The Hair, but this does not necessarily imply any relationship between the East Asian and West Asian names of this asterism, although exchange is hypothesised with the establishment of the Silk Road. In ancient Babylonian texts the term The Hair does not appear. Instead, the Pleiades are only called The Star Cluster in Sumerian, and the Sumerian term was used in later languages as a loanword. The Sumerian and early Babylonian religion associated all constellations with specific deities, including gods, demons, messengers of gods. The Star Cluster was associated with a deity of the Netherworld that was called The Seven and was considered an ensemble of seven speaking weapons or strongly armed gods. The later Greek name of the Seven Sisters might possibly have sprung from an intercultural misunderstanding of this older religious association, since, in fact, seven stars are not seen in this cluster. The star cluster of the Pleiades is really prominent in the sky, and thus was used for several cultural purposes, such as determining the calendar and the spring equinox. However, its significance is frequently overstated in cultural astronomy. As the tradition of representing it with seven dots originates from an ancient Sumerian belief, we should be careful about interpreting any group of seven dots on cave walls and archaeological sites across Europe, Asia and America from the Stone Age onwards as a representation of the Pleiades. Modern astrophysics has found that the star cluster of the Pleiades is extraordinarily young, so there was certainly not an additional star in ancient times. Furthermore, we know that the bright stars are only the core region of an open star cluster that consists of hundreds of stars scattered over an area of the sky which exceeds the bright core by one or two of its diameters in any direction. The photograph does not even show the whole cluster. The group is thought to be about 400 light-years away from Earth, which is relatively close in astronomical terms.
Credit: Mohamed Usama/IAU OAE

Caption: The constellation Andromeda showing the bright stars and surrounding constellations. Andromeda is surrounded by (going clockwise from the top) Cassiopeia, Lacerta, Pegasus, Pisces, Aries, Triangulum and Perseus. The brightest star in Andromeda (Alpheratz) is in the lower part of the constellation. Together with three stars in Pegasus it forms the asterism known as the "Great Square of Pegasus". The next two bright stars in the constellation (Mirach and Almach) form a line extending north-east from Alpheratz. Andromeda is a northern constellation and is most visible in the evenings in the Northern Hemisphere autumn. It is visible from all of the Northern Hemisphere and most temperate regions of the Southern Hemisphere but is not visible from Antarctic and Subantarctic regions. The most famous object in Andromeda, the Andromeda Galaxy is marked here with a red ellipse and its Messier catalog number M31. The yellow circle on the left marks the position of the open cluster NGC 752 and the green circle on the right marks NGC 7662 (the blue snowball nebula), a planetary nebula. The y-axis of this diagram is in degrees of declination and with north as up and the x-axis is in hours of right ascension with east to the left. The sizes of the stars marked here relate to the star's apparent magnitude, a measure of its apparent brightness. The larger dots represent brighter stars. The Greek letters mark the brightest stars in the constellation. These are ranked by brightness with the brightest star being labeled alpha, the second brightest beta, etc., although this ordering is not always followed exactly.
Credit: Adapted by the IAU Office of Astronomy for Education from the original by IAU/Sky & Telescope