Caoimhín's Content

Today we are going to be taking a look at the Beehive Cluster, which is an open cluster of stars that we can see around morning time at the moment. We are going to take a look forward to the year 2031 to observe this cluster in the future for an event that was suggested by a commenter, but we are also going to take a look at it closer to today, and we’re going to take a look at the planets and the Moon moving near this cluster. The Beehive Cluster is an open cluster of stars just like the Pleiades and we can also see the Pleiades at this time of year. Again, this is morning time, and the Pleiades are just a little bit off of south at around 4:15 in the morning and fairly high in the sky.

The Beehive Cluster, which we’re looking for, is in between Gemini and Leo. Some of you might know that that puts the Beehive Cluster in the constellation of Cancer, but the constellation Cancer is pretty difficult to see. Gemini is visible, at the moment with Mars, Pollux and Castor are easy to spot. Just down towards the east is the Sickle of Leo, ending in Regulus, with Jupiter. In between these two constellations is where we’re going to find the Beehive Cluster, almost on a line between Regulus and Pollux, below the Plough or Big Dipper. Certainly from the city, it’s not going to be visible to the naked eye. In a dark sky it is often visible as a fuzzy cluster, a fuzziness in the sky a little bit different from the normal background stars. There is a faint, small trapezoid of stars with the Beehive Cluster right in the middle.

Zooming in lets us see a cluster of many bright stars close together, and that is the Beehive Cluster. Its name in Latin is Praesepe which means “manger”, and it sometimes called the Manger or Manger Cluster. It’s also M44, which means that this is an object in the Messier catalog. I’ve mentioned before that objects on the Messier catalog were discovered back in the 1700s. Very often smaller telescopes and binoculars can see them. In the city, to the naked eye, as we come up to 6 o’clock in the morning with this glow of sunrise in the sky, we’re not really seeing it. If we move through a few dates, moving back in September, the Moon will come into view. The Moon was just next to the Beehive Cluster around the 8th. That Moon was of course, a pretty faint Crescent Moon, but even the Crescent Moon is bright enough to obscure things like an open cluster. Thankfully, it’s not fully obscured, the Moon was visible moving across the Beehive Cluster. This is something that already happened earlier in September. The Crescent Moon drifted across the Beehive Cluster nice and early in the morning, finishing up just as the sky got too bright.

This is surprisingly common. Of course, we’re not going to get an occultation or a transit of the Moon in front of the Beehive Cluster every month, the position of objects in the sky just change too much for that. The Moon doesn’t exactly follow the ecliptic, and the Beehive Cluster isn’t exactly on the ecliptic. However, it is roughly on the same line with the Moon, Jupiter and Mars. It’s in between Gemini and Leo with Cancer in the middle. Those are zodiacal constellations and we see those constellations on the ecliptic. The Beehive Cluster almost right on the ecliptic, at least close enough. We can bring up the actual ecliptic in Stellarium just to check, and the Beehive Cluster is almost exactly on it. It’s a little bit off, but it’s very close to the ecliptic, and this means that the Beehive Cluster often has close conjunctions with the planets and the Moon. The ecliptic is the line that they tend to pass across. We generally have to wait a little bit longer to see conjunctions involving the planets, but of course, the Moon goes around us every month, so we’ll see it passing this part of the sky pretty regularly, now that the Beehive Cluster is coming back in the morning and we can see it again.

We’re going to move out to the countryside, we’ll get rid of all of this light pollution so that we’re looking at a perfectly dark sky. Even with the naked eye, there is just a little bit of fuzziness visible. It doesn’t look like the point of a star, the dot that we would expect. We’re after moving back in time, so the Sickle of Leo is still there, but with Jupiter a little further away. We’ll come forward again and Jupiter moves towards the Sickle of Leo, and Mars moves out of Gemini. I won’t move too far into the future just yet, because that will bring the Moon back into the sky which will make things harder to see again. After zooming in a little bit, a region of the sky that is much denser, with far more stars, is revealed

Trying to click on one of the stars with a common name is tricky. Some seem to be called Gaia, but they aren’t. Instead these are stars that was discovered by the Gaia telescope, in the Gaia survey. Meleph however is one of the stars, in Cancer and in the Beehive Cluster. We’ll bring up, firstly, a very powerful telescope. This gives us a very close up view of these stars, too close to see them as a cluster, with only one or two in the field of view. Moving back firstly to a very large binoculars, really too large, the view is good. Coming back to something a little bit smaller, and even a fairly small binoculars can show you the tighter collection of stars. That’s the Beehive Cluster and the Moon is going to move past it again in the near future. We may as well move forward, to see how close they get in october. The Moon comes around again and it is just on either side of the Beehive Cluster between the 5th and 6th. I am confident that some other location on the Earth will see a close conjunction of the Moon and the Beehive Cluster next month, but we are going to get nice close conjunction of the Moon and Mars on October 5th. We will look at that again in an upcoming piece.

For now we’re going to move through time as I promised in the beginning, we’re going to go forward to 2031. We’ll come back into September and we’ll move forward to the 13th. That puts not only the Moon in roughly the right location, but also Venus. Taking a closer look, these things are very, very bright so it’s going to be tough to pick out the Beehive Cluster. Of course it needs to be fairly nearby, but the brightness of these objects is making it really hard to spot. It’s just a little bit higher in the sky, above the Moon rather than right under it. The Moon and Venus are very close together with the Beehive Cluster just above them, and I think that we’re actually supposed to see an occultation or a conjunction of the Moon and Venus. I think we are, but from here in Ireland, we’re going to be too close to sunrise. I may have mentioned this before, but with the correct protected telescopes, you can look at Venus during the day. However, you need to be very careful and make sure that Venus isn’t too close to the Sun. If we keep moving through time, the Moon will partially occult Venus during the day for us in Ireland. Luckily, the commenter who suggested looking forward to this date and looking roughly in the direction of the Beehive Cluster, even though we are looking clearly at something very different, they did suggest a specific location which I am sure will give us the opportunity to see this in darkness.

We are going much closer to the equator, for me at least. 28 degrees north isn’t really that much closer to the equator, it brings us down to just the very north of Africa. The equator is still a bit far away, but it feels much closer to the equator than what I’m used to. We’re going to 60 degrees west, which puts us in the Atlantic Ocean. We’re off the coast of North America, and I think we’re a little bit south of Bermuda. The Moon and Venus are both visible, with the atmosphere is on, so we are seeing these during the night, just close to morning time. The Moon and Venus are right next to each other and the Moon passes over Venus just as the Sun rises. We’ll pull it back a little bit and we’ll zoom in a little bit closer. We’ve got a Crescent Moon just next to Venus, and it is a Crescent Venus. A lovely pair in the sky. If we keep moving through time a little bit, I think Venus will just barely get occulted by part of the Moon. It does, just about the bottom portion of Venus getting occulted.

Again, I’m sure from other locations the Moon would wholly occult Venus for this and even in other locations where this is visible under a comparably good level of darkness, just like this. However, I’m not going to mess around with the details, this is the view that we were meant to get. This lovely crescent Moon with all of the craters visible along the terminator, and the lovely crescent Venus. They look to be in almost the exact same phase, but Venus is 24.3% illuminated, and the Moon is only 10% illuminated. The Moon is way less illuminated than Venus, but it’s much bigger. Both of those objects are there in 2031, just under the Beehive Cluster. If we zoom in a little bit more, the Beehive Cluster reveals itself. It’s tough to see due to the brightness of the Moon and Venus, but the Beehive Cluster is something you can take a look at with a binoculars for the rest of September this year and, into October, around morning time. It’s going to be over in the east and just between Leo and Gemini. Looking all the way forward to 2031, we have that wonderful conjunction between the Moon and Venus, again happening roughly along the ecliptic, very close to the Beehive Cluster in the sky.

I hope that you get a chance to see the Beehive Cluster in real life, and in 2031, a chance to see this occultation as well. If you don’t, then of course, you’ve already gotten an idea of what they’ll be like here. I hope that you enjoyed this piece. If you did then please do like it. If you like this kind of content, then please subscribe to this website and my YouTube channel. Thank you very much for reading and hopefully I’ll see you back here next time.