Beehive Cluster: I Don’t See Anything There [Magnitude]

Light Pollution

In light polluted areas, seeing fuzzy star clusters is nearly impossible to the naked eye.  Therefore, when I attended a Star Party at the Virginia Living Museum, I wasn’t ready for the result.  Ok full disclosure, it was my first Star Party.  The lyrics from Arrested Development’s Tennessee come to mind, “the date was going great and my soul was at ease until a group…”  Ah yes a group started bugging out and it was amazing.  I was given the task to point my telescope at the Beehive Cluster, aka M44.  The Beehive Cluster is an open star cluster.  Everyone who looked at the cluster was amazed, be that as it may the stars in the cluster were invisible.  Comments like “There’s nothing there” or “I see nothing in that part of the sky” or “That’s amazing!” were thrown out like bags of peanuts at a Nationals game.

A Little Science

So, your question is “how does this happen?”  Here’s an example from my backyard.  Yes, however, I had to do this again for effect.  Just take a look at the sky between the trees.  It’s dark blue and almost devoid of stars.  The sky is “bright” because of the lights around Hampton Roads Virginia. Let me get a bit scientific here.  A telescope can pierce through this light pollution and expose the stars that are there.  It does this by focusing the light to a single focal point.  Under magnification, the user to focus on this small point.  The larger the aperture the more stars you can see.  This great engineering marvel is what delivers the impactful punch we saw that night.

Here’s the final edited picture:

How I Captured the Beehive Cluster

Yes, you guessed it, I used the Meade EXT-125 telescope and Google Pixel to capture the photo.  The camera has to be set to ISO 800 or higher to let in enough light to see the stars and minimize the amount of noise in the photo.  This setting also depends on the seeing conditions at the time. There are about 1000 stars in the Beehive Cluster and is young at around 600 million years old.  Perched around 577 light years away it’s a perfect target for amateur telescopes.  Although, there are many more experienced, astronomers that will tell you that Messier found more impressive star clusters and the crowd favorite is M13, the Great Globular cluster.  Do this with your neighbors and friends and wait for it…wait for it…yep there it is.  Tell me about your experience.