On a whim, I went outside tonight with my binoculars to take a look around the sky. I’m so glad I did, because I saw the coolest thing I have seen thus far with my binoculars.
I saw the Orion Nebula.
With the naked eye, the Orion Nebula looks unremarkable. It’s a smudge of a feature under Orion’s belt. It looks a bit like a dim star. But when the region is magnified, you see it is not a dim star, but several bright stars surrounded by a large cloud of dust and gas. You can actually SEE the dust/gas. It is incredible, and no verbal description I give here will ever do it justice.
For anyone reading this saying, “What the heck is she talking about?” :
A nebula is a cloud of gas or dust, usually found in the spiral arms of a galaxy. Some are bright because they are being lit by the stars within them, while others are dark. There are two main kinds of nebulae, emission and planetary. An emission nebula, or star-forming nebula, is a region of space where new stars are being born. The Orion Nebula is one of these star-forming nebulae. A planetary nebula is a region of space where a star has run out of gas and is beginning to die… the nebula is the result of the star’s outer layers blowing apart and away from the star’s core. Planets are not forming within planetary nebulae, they are given that name because they look like a planet-shaped disk through telescopes from Earth.
Therefore, viewing the Orion Nebula is watching stars and possibly new planets form!
Further FYI: Orion is the 26th largest constellation in the sky. According to Greek mythology, Orion was a warrior who was stung to death by a scorpion, which was the explanation for its position next to the constellation Scorpius in the sky. The Orion Nebula (also known as M42), along with a few star clusters, form Orion’s sword, and is 1500 light years away.
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