Agenor, son of Poseidon and Libya, migrated to Phoenicia where he founded a kingdom and had several sons and one daughter, Europa, who was a beauty. One day she was out picking flowers with her friends by the shore when Zeus flew by and her beauty caught his eye (Zeus was like that!). He disguised himself as a pure white bull with shining horns. The girls were scared at first but the bull seemed so gentle that eventually they fed it flowers and hung garlands on its horns. When he lay down, Europa climbed onto his back and Zeus leapt up and carried her far over the sea to Crete where she bore him three sons before she married Asterios, the king of Crete, who brought up her sons by Zeus as his own. Meanwhile the bull was immortalised by being transferred to the sky as the constellation of Taurus where he keeps Orion away from the Pleiades.
Taurus is not a conspicuous constellation and contains only two bright stars, Aldebaran (α, magnitude 0.85) and Alnath (β, magnitude 1.65). However it contains two star clusters, the Pleiades (M45) and the Hyades, and M1 (the Crab Nebula), the remnant of a supernova which was seen exploding in 1054. The Hyades is such an open cluster that the individual stars (ε, δ, γ, and θ) are clearly seen without optical aid.
The picture was taken with an Olympus C-5050 camera with 16 seconds exposure at f/2.6 and ISO 400 at 21:45 UT on 26 January 2009. It has been enhanced by slightly increasing the contrast and brightness. There is a lot of sky glow in this picture but I found it impossible to remove it without losing the Hyades as well.