This week’s What’s Up is another instructional segment on how to do astronomy. Today, you will learn how to star hop to Messier 44 using binoculars.

Messier 44 (M44) is an open cluster in the constellation of Cancer that is more commonly known as the Beehive Cluster.

An open cluster is a group of stars that look like they’re close together but in most situations, are unrelated. In this case, at least a thousand stars in the Beehive Cluster are gravitationally bound together and have evolved as a group. There are a variety of stars of different types and ages in the cluster, which may have come from the same ancestor population as another famous open cluster, the Hyades in Taurus.

M44 is 187 parsecs from Earth, making it one of the closest open clusters. For comparison, Messier 45, another open cluster, is about 440 parsecs away from Earth. A parsec is a unit of distance equivalent to 3.26 light-years.

The problem with seeing deep sky objects is that they are faint. A telescope or binoculars helps with the dimness by collecting lots of light and focusing it on your eye. However, the field of view of a telescope is much narrower than the unaided eye, so it’s not as easy to find things. 

The basic principle of star-hopping is to guide yourself to a deep sky object using a series of landmark stars, starting with those you can see unaided, and then using fainter stars through optics to finally arrive at the object.

M44 has several good landmark stars with which to start a hop in binoculars. The best one of these is Pollux, in the constellation Gemini. To find M44 in 7×50 or 10×50 binoculars, find Pollux and center it in your view. Pollux is the brighter of the main pair of stars in Gemini.

Slowly move down toward the horizon. Note what the pattern of stars looks like at the bottom of the field of view and move the binoculars so that what was on the bottom is now at the top.

Repeat this process two times, and you should see a tight patch of stars peeking out of the left edge of the view. This is the cluster Messier 44. 

In areas with high light pollution, it may be difficult to see more than a handful of stars, but it’s there. You can spend lots of time looking at all of the stars in the cluster. Using higher power optics, such as a telescope, will reward you with even more stars, though the star hop is more complicated and out of the scope of this segment. rimshot  

I’ll be here all week; I work from home.

Whatever you do, take some time to go outside and look up.

More Information

Messier 44 (The Munich Astro Archive)

PDF: The proper motion and the distance of the Praesepe cluster (ADS)

Parallaxes and proper motions for 20 open clusters as based on the new Hipparcos catalogue (ADS)

“The Distance to the Pleiades According to Gaia DR2,” Guillermo Abramson, 2018 August, RNAAS