page_title: Beehive Cluster
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Beehive Cluster / History
caption_attribution_description: Karte der Praesepe für 1875 im umkehrenden Fernrohr, Zeichnung von Wilhelm Schur, 1894.
context_page_description: The Beehive Cluster, is an open cluster in the constellation Cancer. It is one of the nearest open clusters to Earth, containing a larger population of stars than other nearby bright open clusters. Under dark skies, the Beehive Cluster looks like a small nebulous object to the naked eye; as known since ancient times. Classical astronomer Ptolemy described it as "nebulous mass in the breast of Cancer", and it was among the first objects that Galileo studied with his
  telescope.
  Age and proper motion coincide with those of the Hyades, suggesting they may share similar origins. Both clusters also contain red giants and white dwarfs, which represent later stages of stellar evolution, along with many main sequence stars.
  Distance to M44 is often cited to be between 160 and 187 parsecs, but the revised Hipparcos parallaxes for Praesepe members and the latest infrared color-magnitude diagram favors an analogous distance of 182 pc. There are better age estimates of around 600 million years, equivalent to about 625 million years, for the Hyades. The diameter of the bright inner cluster core is about 7.0 parsecs.
context_section_description: In 1609, Galileo first telescopically observed the Beehive and was able to resolve it into 40 stars.  Charles Messier added it to his famous catalog in 1769 after precisely measuring its position in the sky. Along with the Orion Nebula and the Pleiades cluster, Messier's inclusion of the Beehive has been noted as curious, as most of Messier's objects were much fainter and more easily confused with comets. Another possibility is that Messier simply wanted to have a larger catalog than his scientific rival Lacaille, whose 1755 catalog contained 42 objects, and so he added some well-known bright objects to boost his list. Wilhelm Schur, as director of the Göttingen Observatory, drew a map of the cluster in 1894.
  Ancient Greeks and Romans saw this object as a manger from which two donkeys, the adjacent stars Asellus Borealis and Asellus Australis, are eating; these are the donkeys that Dionysos and Silenus rode into battle against the Titans.
  Hipparchus (c.130 BC) refers to the cluster as Nephelion ("Little Cloud") in his star catalog. Claudius Ptolemy's Almagest includes the Beehive Cluster as one of seven "nebulae" (four of which are  real), describing it as "The Nebulous Mass in the Breast (of Cancer)". Aratus (c.260–270 BC) calls the cluster Achlus or "Little Mist" in his poem Phainomaina.
  This perceived nebulous object is in the Ghost (Gui Xiu), the 23rd lunar mansion of ancient Chinese astrology.  Ancient Chinese skywatchers saw this as a ghost or demon riding in a carriage and likened its appearance to a "cloud of pollen blown from willow catkins". It was also known by the somewhat less romantic name of Jishi qi (積屍氣, also transliterated Tseih She Ke), the "Exhalation of Piled-up Corpses". It is also known simply as Jishi (積屍), "cumulative corpses".
caption: Wilhelm Schur's map of the Beehive Cluster in 1894
exif: {}