During winter and spring in the Northern hemisphere star clusters and galaxies become most visible.  M 44 is a gravitationally bound cluster which has been moving through space for 600 million years and is approx 600 light-years from Earth.  This image is made from 169 2-minute exposures captured in January 2023 using an 840mm esprit 120ED telescope and an ASI2600MC astrophotography camera from my driveway in the hills of NC, USA.

So what's in the image?

The Beehive Cluster (also known as Praesepe (Latin for "manger" or "crib"), M44, NGC 2632, or Cr 189), is an open cluster in the constellation Cancer. One of the nearest open clusters to Earth, it contains a larger population of stars than other nearby bright open clusters, holding around 1,000 stars. Under dark skies, the Beehive Cluster looks like a small nebulous object to the naked eye, and has been known since ancient times. Classical astronomer Ptolemy described it as a "nebulous mass in the breast of Cancer". It was among the first objects that Galileo studied with his telescope.  

Messier 44 has experienced mass segregation, a process often seen in star clusters and other gravitationally bound systems (e.g. galaxy clusters), by which heavier objects move toward the centre, while lighter ones move away from the centre. The bright, massive stars of M44 are now concentrated in the central region of the cluster while the fainter, less massive members are found in the halo.

A recent survey counts 1010 high-probability members, of which 68% are M dwarfs, 30% are Sun-like stars of spectral classes F, G, and K, and about 2% are bright stars of spectral class A. Also present are five giant stars, four of which have spectral class K0 III and the fifth G0 III.

So far, eleven white dwarfs have been identified, representing the final evolutionary phase of the cluster's most massive stars, which originally belonged to spectral type B. Brown dwarfs, however, are extremely rare in this cluster, probably because they have been lost by tidal stripping from the halo.  

In September, 2012 two planets which orbit separate stars were discovered in the Beehive Cluster. The finding was significant for being the first planets detected orbiting stars like Earth's Sun that were situated in stellar clusters. Planets had previously been detected in such clusters, but not orbiting stars like the Sun.  In 2016 additional observations concluded that in the Pr0211 system there are actually two planets, the second one being Pr0211 c.

When I removed the stars from the image I could see approx 10 galaxies in the image.  Most were very faint but a few were easily seen as spiral galaxies. I'm hoping a couple are identified in plate solving the image.