Identified by Ptolemy in the second century AD, the open star cluster was known in Greek and Roman mythology as Praesepe (The Manger). Soon after developing the so-called ‘Dutch Gadget’ for use in astronomy as a refractor in 1609, Galileo became the first person to properly observe through the telescope what is now known as The Beehive Cluster and thus detect some 40 stars.  In 1769 Messier added the cluster to his growing catalogue as the 44^th object and thus became M44.  More than 400 years since Galileo’s first view, the Beehive Cluster AKA M44, Praesepe or more prosaically NGC 2632, is now known to consist of approximately 1,000 stars and forms one of the imaging targets at or about the time of the Spring Equinox each year.

Located in our galaxy relatively nearby within the constellation Cancer, between 520 and 610 light-years away and 3-times the Moon’s diameter or 1.5^o, The Beehive can be seen with the naked eye as a blur in dark skies and with a telescope becomes an excellent imaging target.  Last imaged with the modded Canon 550D DSLR in 2015, the LRGB image obtained this time shows improvement but with only 20-minutes integration time lacks the colour seen in other examples, which however consist of more than 17 hours! Truth is that this was a brief experiment carried out between imaging two other objects on the same night and I’m encouraged that by increasing my time significantly I can eventually tease out better quality and the spectacular colours that make The Beehive such an attractive open cluster.