Every year at this time, and throughout the winter months, there are some places in the sky that draw our attention like a flame lures moths. One attraction, of course, is the mighty constellation of Orion. Another might be Sirius, that intensely bright star to the east of him. But another inevitable eye-catcher is that little group of stars just to the "right" of Orion, the little cluster called the Pleiades.

Known to most people groups for millennia by many names, our name - the Pleiades - comes from the Greek myths about Atlas and his seven daughters. Hence, our alternate epithet for the cluster, The Seven Sisters.

It takes little imagination to see why, in astronomy, the Pleiades are called a "star cluster." But star cluster in astroland, specifically an "open" cluster like the Pleiades, implies more. It tells us that the stars there were born and raised at essentially the same time and place. The sisters in this family started forming about 100 million years ago.

And there are far more than the half dozen or so we can see with the naked eye, or even the dozens we can see through binoculars. There are over a thousand stars there, all traveling through the galaxy together like a flock of seagulls.

One particular bit of space trivia allows the Sisters to appear even more beautiful in photographic images taken of the area. At the moment they are traveling through a galactic cloud of dust and gas. When a star has a cloud around it, its light can be deflected in strange ways.

A star gives off all kinds of wavelengths, the whole rainbow of colors, just like our sun. But when that light passes through very small, microscopic bits of dust, the blue end of the spectrum gets scattered about quite well. Some of those scattered blue photons get thrown in our direction. So, the Pleiades looks like it's swimming through a veil of blue light. Coincidentally, this same effect is why our skies are blue; many of the blue photons of our sun's light get scattered in our atmosphere and - voilà! - blue skies.

One more thing about the Sisters: They are not the Little Dipper. The Little Dipper is an asterism over in Ursa Minor which includes the pole star, Polaris, aka the North Star.

Regardless of what you want to call it, take time this winter to grab a pair of binoculars and focus on the Pleiades, and find images online if you can. The Sisters are a sparkling bit of cosmic beauty.