Beehive Cluster

Beehive Cluster — star cluster, explore its interactive 3D model in Cosmoscope.

Explore the Beehive Cluster in an interactive 3D star cluster. Fly among its real Gaia member stars, each placed at its catalogued position.

A swarm of stars in Cancer that looks like a faint glowing cloud to the naked eye. Galileo’s telescope first showed it was made of stars; Gaia now pins down more than a thousand of its members.

Type

Open star cluster (Praesepe, M44)

Distance

600 light-years

Age

~650 million years — about as old as the Hyades

Stars

1,314 Gaia DR3 members shown · ~1,000 Suns of mass in all

Shown here

Each member at its Gaia DR3 position (Hunt & Reffert 2023)

Depths

Faint stars with uncertain parallaxes are held near the cluster’s mean depth

Visible

Naked eye — a misty patch in Cancer, split into stars by Galileo in 1610

Explore Beehive Cluster in 3D

Beehive Cluster is placed in three-dimensional space using catalogue coordinates and an adopted astronomical distance. Rotate and zoom to explore the model. Stellar surfaces, gas structure and dust depths may be reconstructed or illustrative, as described in its facts; this is not live imagery from a telescope.