Visual_Astronomer wrote:
I know where to look but I still am having a hard time finding the the familiar four stars. I have seen them many times through a scope, as well as their fainter E & F companions, but I can't find them in this picture!
That's because you can't see the four stars of the Trapezium in this picture!
The sky looks so different in infrared light than in visual light. Remember that the Trapezium stars are very hot. Infrared sensors are very bad at picking out hot sources. Like someone said about the new James Webb telescope, which will be incredibly sensitive to infrared wavelengths but will be bad at seeing hot sources - James Webb
may be able to spot new supernovas. Or not.
When I said, in one of my posts, that the Trapezium looks so different in the APOD, I meant that the Trapezium
region looks so different, and that the dust patterns are interesting. I can see now that my choice of words was confusing.
Anyway, check out
this infrared (WISE) image of the Pleiades. All the brightest stars in the Pleiades are (relatively) hot, although much cooler than the four stars of the Trapezium. But the dusty nebula of the Pleiades is cool, and WISE really makes it stand out. But it is not that easy to spot the familiar configuration of the stars of the Pleiades in the WISE image.
Ann
EDIT: I said that infrared sensors are very bad at picking out hot sources. I should amend that by saying that infrared sensors can only sense infrared light, whether it comes from hot or cool sources. But cool sources emit most of their energy as infrared light, whereas hot sources emit very little of their energy as infrared light. Therefore hot sources typically look faint in infrared images.