The Pleiades have been known for thousands of years to cultures all around the world. The earliest written record is by Homer in his work The Iliad, circa 750 BC. They are mentioned three times in The Bible. In mythology, they are known as the Seven Sisters, the nymph daughters of Atlas and Pleione. It is said that they became stars in order to escape the attentions of Orion, the hunter, who still pursues them across the sky.

The Pleiades is an open star cluster containing middle-aged hot B-type stars located in the constellation of Taurus. It is among the nearest star clusters to Earth and is the cluster most obvious to the naked eye in the night sky. Typically, five, six or seven stars are visible to the unaided eye. Under very dark skies it can be possible to make out up to nine stars, although it is estimated that the cluster contains over a thousand stars.

The cluster is dominated by hot blue and extremely luminous stars that have formed within the last 100 to 150 million years. Dust that forms a faint reflection nebulosity around the brightest stars was thought at first to be left over from the formation of the cluster, but is now known to be an unrelated dust cloud in the interstellar medium, through which the stars are currently passing. This can be seen from the fact that its radial velocity differs from the cluster's by 11 km/s.

On its journey through space, like most open clusters, the Pleiades will not stay gravitationally bound forever. Eventually, the cluster's space motion will carry the Pleiades below the feet of Orion, as seen from Earth. Calculations suggest that due to gravitational interaction with the galactic neighbourhood along its route, the cluster will take about 250 million years to disperse.