Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

Tuesday, October 18th.  The sun will rise at 8:01.  It’ll be up for 10 hours and 52 minutes, setting at 6:53.   The moon, 1 day before last quarter, will rise at 11:25 this evening.  |  A marvelous member of the autumn skies can be found rising in the east at 9 in the evening.  It is the famous star cluster called the Pleiades or the Seven Sisters.  I might also add the ‘Tiny Dipper’.  Many people can spot a tiny dipper shape in its six or seven stars, and mistake it for the Little Dipper.  As nearsighted as I am, though corrected, I’ve never been able to see more than a few stars and a bit of fuzz.  However with binoculars, even I can see over a hundred stars appear along with the dipper shape of the brightest.  The fuzz I saw was unresolved stars, but in photographs the Pleiades actually contains remnant wisps of the gaseous cocoon they were born from a hundred million years ago.  In Greek mythology the sisters were daughters of the god Atlas.

* Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan.  They may be different for your location.

Addendum

The Pleiades, about what you'd see in binoculars.