Wednesday 27 October 2010

A winter spectacle seen on an autumn predawn

ON this wide picture of the Great Orion Nebula complex, you’ll see the beautiful clouds of gas and dust reflecting and fluorescing the light from the bright blue stars at the centre. If you step back and take in the grand scene, all 10 square degrees of it, you will start to see among the bright blue stars, a few little orange stars. And then, towards the lower right, a few of the background Milky Way stars start to creep into shot. Fingers of opaque, black dust can just be made out streaming off to the right, by virtue of the incursions of stars visible behind it. All of which gives you a clue to the real size of this patch of interstellar material. I find it very odd how a vertical line of four different types of object have arranged themselves on the sky like this, for us to see (check out Messier 8). Not bad for a 2 minute exposure (18/09/10).

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