Star cluster · M44about 600 light-years away
Beehive Cluster
The Beehive Cluster (Messier 44), also called Praesepe, is one of the nearest open star clusters to Earth — a swarm of roughly 1,000 loosely bound stars about 600 light-years away in the constellation Cancer. Visible to the naked eye as a hazy patch since antiquity, it was famously resolved into individual stars by Galileo in 1609, and at around 600-700 million years old it shares an age and motion with the Hyades, hinting the two clusters were born together.
