How do you find the Pleiades in the night sky?

Find Orion’s Belt, the three stars in a row, and follow the line they make up and to the right (in the northern hemisphere). You’ll pass a bright orange star, Aldebaran, and then reach a small, misty group of six or seven stars. That’s the Pleiades, also called the Seven Sisters or M45.

When to look

From the northern hemisphere, the Pleiades rise in the east on autumn evenings and are high in the south on winter evenings. From the southern hemisphere they’re visible in the same months, lower in the northern sky, and Orion’s Belt points down and to the left towards them.

What you’ll see

A tiny shape that looks like a miniature dipper, about the width of your little finger and thumb together at arm’s length. Look slightly to one side of it and more stars appear; that’s averted vision. Binoculars turn it into a field of blue-white stars.

The Little Dipper mix-up

Many people see the Pleiades and call it the Little Dipper, because both look like small dippers.

	Pleiades	Little Dipper
Size	Tiny, a few degrees	Large, about 20° long
Brightness	Compact, easy to spot	Most stars faint, hard in cities
Location	Near Orion and Taurus	Around Polaris, in the north
Seasons	Autumn to spring evenings	All year (northern hemisphere)

If the “little dipper” you see is near Orion, it’s the Pleiades.

Other names

The cluster has names in many cultures: Subaru in Japanese, Matariki in Māori, Krittika in India. Sky Map (my app) includes Western, Chinese and Indian sky cultures, and labels Taurus, the constellation the Pleiades belong to, in the live AR view.

Related: how to find constellations, how to find the North Star and the Sky Map guides.