M44 The Beehive Cluster , proteus5

M44 The Beehive Cluster

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The Beehive Cluster, also known as Praesepe (Latin for "manger"), 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, 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.

The cluster's distance is often cited to lie between 160 to 187 parsecs (520-610 light years). The 2009 catalog of revised Hipparcos parallaxes for Praesepe members and the latest iteration of color-magnitude diagram fitting in the infrared favor an analogous distance near 182 pc. There is better agreement on its age, at about 600 million years.[4][6][10] This is equivalent to the age of the Hyades (~625 million years). The bright central core of the cluster has a diameter of about 7 parsecs (22.8 light years).

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M44 The Beehive Cluster , proteus5