SkyHunt: March 2001

Awesome Orion

Winter and early spring skies are famous for crisp, bright views of the heavens. One of the reasons for this is the stars that appear this time of year actually are brighter. The best examples of this are the stars in—and centreing around—the constellation Orion.

To see Orion in March from the GTA, look to the southwest after about 8 p.m. You’ll find a wealth of bright stars, including ones in the constellations Canis Major (the big dog), Taurus (the bull), several bright star clusters and Orion itself. This year, two other bright “stars” - the planets Jupiter and Saturn - also join this celestial traffic-jam.

After the Big Dipper, Orion (the mighty hunter in Greek mythology) is probably the most widely recognized constellation, but even more interesting, it is home to a gorgeous stellar nursery you can see with just a sharp eye or binoculars.

That stellar nursery—known as the Orion Nebula—is a sprawling pink and blue cloud of hydrogen nearly 25 light years wide. That’s almost 42,000 times wider than the orbit of Pluto, our solar system’s most remote planet.

Inside the nebula, lumps of proto-stellar material are forming into stars and planets right now. Through a pair of ordinary binoculars, this cloud will appear as a gray or green wisp amongst the chain of stars of Orion’s “sword” - just below the famous three stars of his “belt.”