If true, that seems pretty weird. Why on Earth would you put one of your SSBNs in the vicinity of a group of surface ships that is inevitably going to attract interest from potential adversaries? Surely one of the central tenets of SSBN operation is that you do everything in your power to make sure no-one knows where you are, or gets close enough to get a sniff of your acoustic signature? I almost wonder whether it's a poorly-chosen library photo...
As for surfacing with the hatch open - I guess it's conceivable one might have a hatch issue and have to surface in a hurry to fix it from the outside (if it wasn't an emergency you'd presumably wait, and do it in the dark...)
Edit: Makes more sense in the light of ImageGear's post - separate deployment in a different location...