Heres M45, the Pleiades or Seven Sisters. Quite why Seven I'm not sure - Its an open cluster of young stars, not long after their formation (young stars tend to be blue) - also the nebular gas they were born in still being present is a bit of a give away! You might notice lines and patterns in the blue gas, to a large degree present due to the gravitational pull of the surround stars.

Around 2.5 hours in the image with another 2 -3 in post processing. Exposure lengths were around 8 minutes guided and stacked at 800asa

I use for pretty much all my deepsky work a 6 inch F5 Skywatcher refractor with a four inch f5 piggybacked for guiding or swapped around when I want a different field of view on a HEQ5 Skyscan mount, guided using an Orion Starshoot Autoguider. I also own a nice Revelation 10 Dobsonian Newtonian which has tube rings so that I can at a push put it on the mount (only for higher resolution planetary work in low wind and not GOTOing anything!)

As I progress with this blog i'll be including photos of my kit and further explanations should anyone ask, or be interested.