IF THIS awful weather breaks long enough for a brief glimpse of the sky after dark one night, look for the stars of Orion blazing above the southern horizon. Hourglass-shaped Orion is one of the most famous constellations in the sky, unmistakeable because of its diagonal 'belt' of three blue stars at its waist. Look more closely though and you'll see Orion also has a sword - a smaller, more vertical line of three fainter stars hanging from the left side of the belt.
But look closely at the sword itself, through binoculars, and you will see that the middle star isn't a star at all - it's a glowing, misty blur. That's because the middle star is actually one of the most famous objects in the sky: the Orion Nebula.
The nebula is a huge cloud of gas and dust, where stars are being born. Five billion years ago our own Sun formed in one just like it. Although photographs taken through telescopes show beautiful veils and billows of green, blue and pink in the nebula, your binoculars will just show you just a grey-white patch of mist. But that’s not bad, considering the nebula is over 1,300 light years away, so the faint light reaching us from it now set off in the year 715!
If you don’t have binoculars you can still enjoy the striking colours of Orion’s stars, particularly the beautiful orange-red of Betelgeuse (top left corner) and the icy blue-white of Rigel (bottom right corner).
Stuart Atkinson
Eddington Astronomical Society
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