M44 - The Beehive Cluster (Brett Kozma)

M44 - The Beehive Cluster

The beehive cluster is a large open cluster containing red giants, white dwarfs and large bright blue main sequence stars. This cluster, also called Praesepe, is one of the nearest open clusters to the Earth, at an estimated 600 light years distant. I, as many of you know, am a beekeeper, so I've had this object on my "to image" list for a long time because of the name. Not only is it a beautiful open cluster with a curious name, but it has some interesting history as well. Since you can clearly see this cluster, under dark skies, with your naked eye, it has long been a part of myth and legend. It looks like a cloud, or a nebula, when viewed in that way, and because of this it was one of the first objects Gallileo viewed with his first telescope. This object also oddly made it onto Charles Messier's list of objects that he thought were comets, even though it's pretty obviously not a comet when you view it under magnification, either way, it's dubbed M44 because of his inclusion of this object. So, this large open cluster of stars has tons of history, and it contains tons of beautiful stars, some which are harboring solar systems of their own, with a couple of very large "hot Jupiter" planets found orbiting close to a couple of stars in this cluster.

This image project was a rare one nighter, and only contains around 2 hours of data with 58 x 120s subs.

Technical information

_______________________________________

Imaging Scope: 115mm Meade 6000 Triplet Apo

Imaging Camera: ZWO ASI071MC Pro

Guiding Telescope: William Optics 50mm Guider

Guiding Camera: ZWO ASI 120MC Mini

Mount: Skywatcher EQ-6R Pro

Filters: Baader Uv/Ir Cut

Capture Software: Sequence Generator Pro

Processing Software: Astro Pixel Processor, Pixinsight and Photoshop

Exposures

58 x 120s UV/IR Cut

total of 2 hours

	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3340739
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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M44 - The Beehive Cluster

M44 - The Beehive Cluster

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M44 - The Beehive Cluster

M44 - The Beehive Cluster

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