The Orion Nebula M42 is the most spectacular deep-sky object visible through almost any telescope. Other than the moon, there is no other object in the night sky that reveals as much detail as M42. It is visible to the naked eye as the fuzzy central star in Orion’s sword.
The Orion Nebula is an enormous cloud of gas and dust, one of many in our Milky Way galaxy. It lies roughly 1,300 light-years from Earth. At some 30 to 40 light-years in diameter, this great big nebulous cocoon is giving birth to perhaps a thousand stars. A young open star cluster, whose stars were born at the same time from a portion of the nebula and are still loosely bound by gravity, can be seen within the nebula.
The four brightest stars in the Orion Nebula can be seen through amateur astronomers’ telescopes and are affectionately known as The Trapezium. The light of the young, hot Trapezium stars illuminates the Orion Nebula. These stars are only a million or so years old – babies on the scale of star lifetimes.
Although it actually part of the same nebula, the separate smaller region at the top of this image has the designation M43 and looks like a separate object through a small telescope. Many observers think that M42 resembles a great bird, with M43 as the head and the brighter parts of M42 as the body and wings of the bird.
You can see a stunning tapestry of knots, lumps and tendrils of nebulosity.
Finally, here is a less exposured zoomed in view of the central brightest part of M42, that reveals the trapezium. The four stars in the trapezium quadrilangle are known as Theta-1 Orionis, while the three stars in a line to its lower left are known as Theta-2 Orionis. You can see Theta-2 in the brighter picture, while the trapezium is overpowered by the brightest part of the nebulosity.
