The Beehive Cluster, also known as Praesepe, M44, NGC 2632, or Cr 189, is an open cluster in the constellation Cancer. It is one of the nearest open clusters to the Solar System (~577 light years), and it contains a larger star population than most other nearby clusters. Under dark skies the Beehive Cluster looks like a nebulous object to the naked eye; thus it has been known since ancient times. The classical astronomer Ptolemy called it "the nebulous mass in the breast of Cancer," and it was among the first objects that Galileo studied with his telescope.

Galileo was the first to observe the Beehive in a telescope, in 1609, and 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. Along with the Orion Nebula and the Pleiades cluster, Messier's inclusion of the Beehive has been noted as curious, as most of Messier's objects were much fainter and more easily confused with comets. One possibility is that Messier simply wanted to have a larger catalog than his scientific rival Lacaille, whose 1755 catalog contained 42 objects, and so he added some bright, well-known objects to boost his list.-Wiki

I have been having some problems with the new HDX110 mount, so this made a nice target to shoot with a full moon in the sky. The brighter stars showed some obvious spikes from the microlensing of the 8300 camera, so I decided to add some spikes in Photoshop using one of Carboni's actions and then lowering the opacity a bit. I usually dont add spikes to my images, but felt it appropriate for a nice Open Cluster and thought it looked better than the spikes from the microlensing. It covered them nicely.

Happy to say I had no problems with the mount on this night as well as a few hours on a previous session. I'm trying to not get too excited, but am hoping I've remedied the problem(s).

Revision C is annotated. There's quite a few little galaxies scattered around in the cluster.