| | Barnard's Merope Nebula IC 349 in M45 |
 | | In 1890, American astronomer E. Barnard, observing visually with the Lick Observatory 36-inch telescope in California, discovered an exceptionally bright nebulosity adjacent to the bright Pleiades star Merope. |
 | | It is now cataloged as IC 349, or "Barnard's Merope Nebula." IC 349 is so bright because it lies extremely close to Merope -- only about 3,500 times the separation of the Earth from the Sun, or about 0.06 light-year -- and thus is strongly illuminated by the star's light. |
 | | NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has caught the eerie, wispy tendrils of this dark interstellar cloud being destroyed by the passage of one of the brightest stars in the Pleiades star cluster. |
| www.seds.org /messier/more/m045_i349.html (450 words) |