Beehive Cluster

Astronomy Digital Picture – Photograph from a normal digital camera, and a short summary of the photo

30 Jan 2007

The Beehive Cluster is an open cluster in the constellation Cancer. It looks like a nebulous object to the naked eye under dark skies.

Galileo(in 1609) was the first to observe the Beehive in a telescope. He was able to resolve it into 40 stars. Charles Messier added it to his famous catalog in 1769 after precisely measuring its position in the sky.

The cluster is about 16 light years in diameter and contains at least 200 stars confirmed to be bound to the cluster, out of 350 total in the vicinity. It has a visual brightness of magnitude 3.7. The Beehive is one of the older and larger open clusters known.

Its estimated to be 730 million year old, and 577 light years away. Its age and proper motion coincide with the Hyades open cluster, suggesting they were created in the same diffuse nebula. Both contain red giants and white dwarfs, but the brightest stars are class A, F, and G stars.

Tomorrow’s picture – Ramanujan Telescope.