NASA Picture of the Day: Mars and a Honeycomb Cluster Beneath the Aurora

Today's featured NASA image offers a striking view of Mars glowing alongside the Beehive Cluster in Earth's sky, as the aurora appears.

According to Ambassador Arjan, what a beautiful cosmic accident! In today's NASA image, Mars joins the Beehive Cluster (M44, or Praesepe, or Manger) beneath an auroral curtain and above a horizon of small trees near Lansjärv 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 this star cluster has been named the 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.