The grandest fireworks of them all! The Orion Nebula (M42).

If you are familiar with the Orion constellation, you've seen this lantern of light as the middle "star" in Orion's sword. This nebula is the brightest in our sky. In fact, it is the closest star-forming region to planet Earth. It's only 1300 light years away.

This is a target most of us return to every year, hoping to somehow do a better job of capturing its magnificence. This year I went extra close and adjusted the exposure to reveal more clearly the stars at the center.

Orion is probably the most studied nebula out there. And it is the most photographed by us amateurs. Scientists studying this nebula first began to learn how stars are formed within the clouds of hydrogen, dust, and ash.

Most recently, astronomers have even discovered planets being formed. The large number of them suggests that the formation of planetary systems is fairly common in the universe. The Hubble telescope has actually been able to show a few of these.

See the super-bright stars in the center of the image? These as a group have been named The Trapezium. There are six stars in the tightest part. This cluster is glowing blue and is super hot, indicating that it is very young, some as young as 10,000 years old. The stars' ultraviolet radiation is repelling the surrounding gas in a massive display of force, making hydrogen atoms glow red. Oxygen, dust, and ash are reflecting the stars' blue light.

These bright stars may have been noted even by the Mayans. Since we can make out the surrounding nebula with our own eyes, it is conspicuous that it was not mentioned in recorded history before 1610, suggesting a flare up in brightness at that point. 

This is not a nebula created by an old exploding star. It's probably a much larger and dense cloud of intergalactic gas...the kind of cloud that makes up most of our galaxy. Parts of it bunched up from gravitational forces and collapsed into dense pockets that ignited to form stars. Hundreds are thought to have been formed here.

This is just one feature within the Orion molecular cloud complex. One could spend a lot of time exploring just this area of the sky. Horsehead, Flame, Barnard's Loop, and others are all within this same mass of intergalactic gas.

A region like this is volatile. the hottest stars will not last long, exploding into supernovas and creating their own nebula-within-the-nebula. The massive glow of nebulonic light we see now will dissipate and fade, disappearing again from human view.

All things must pass.

Tonight's notes were written to a song by the Steve Allee Trio called 𝘚𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦.