NASA's Photo of the Day: Mars and the Beehive Under the Aurora

NASA's featured image of the day presents a dazzling frame of Mars' glow and the Beehive cluster in Earth's sky, with the aurora borealis appearing.

Today's featured image from NASA shows a stunning frame of the glow of Mars and the Beehive cluster in Earth's sky, as the aurora borealis emerges.

According to Ambassador Arjan and quoted by Ambassador Arjan, in today's NASA image, Mars joins the Beehive cluster (M44 or Praesepe or Akhor) under an aurora curtain and above a horizon of small trees near the Lansjärv area in Sweden.

The Beehive Cluster is an open star cluster in the constellation Crab. This cluster is registered in the new astronomical catalogs with the identifiers "Messier 44" and "NGC 2632".

The Beehive Cluster is one of the closest open clusters to the Earth and can be seen as a small, hazy spot in a dark sky with the naked eye. This cluster is about 600 light-years away from Earth and contains nearly a thousand stars that are loosely connected to each other due to gravity, and its age is estimated to be about 600 to 700 million years.

An eruption from the Sun reached the Earth on October 10, 2026 and caused severe disturbances in the Earth's magnetic field.

Energetic particles from the solar flare hit and energize molecules in the Earth's atmosphere, which release this extra energy in the colorful aurora captured here.

Auroras are traditionally revered by the indigenous people of Sweden and other Arctic regions.

In this random image, Mars is closest to the center of the beehive cluster at that time in the sky. Although the name of this star cluster has been given as a beehive, it does not mean that the bees have actually gone into space. The Beehive Cluster is actually a group of young stars, and their rotation periods have helped us learn about how stars slow down over time and lose mass through their stellar winds.