Beehive Cluster
A swarm of stars in Cancer that looks like a small cloud to the eye and breaks into dozens of stars in binoculars.
Tonight from
Rise, highest point and set are worked out on your device for the place above.
What it is
- Kind of object
- Open star cluster
- Distance
- 577 light years
- Brightness
- Magnitude 3.7, visible to the eye from a dark site, easy in binoculars
- Size in the sky
- About 3 times the width of the full Moon
- Constellation
- Cancer
- Catalogue
- M 44, NGC 2632
Figures from OpenNGC, CC BY-SA 4.0; the SEDS Messier catalogue, via Wikipedia’s table of Messier objects, CC BY-SA 4.0. All sources
Near it in the sky
- PolluxAn orange giant in Gemini, about a hand span away.
- CastorA white main-sequence star in Gemini, about a hand span away.
- ProcyonA yellow-white subgiant in Canis Minor, about a hand span away.
- RegulusA blue-white main-sequence star in Leo, about a hand span away.
- M 35An open cluster in Gemini, about two hand spans away.