SkyHunt: January 2003
Awesome Orion

Winter 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 among the brightest you can see. The best examples of this are the stars in — and centreing around — the constellation Orion.

To see Orion this month from the GTA, look to the east after about 8 p.m. You’ll find a wealth of bright stars, including those in the constellations Canis Major (the big dog), Taurus (the bull), several bright star clusters and Orion itself.

After the Big Dipper, Orion (the mighty hunter, in Greek mythology) is probably the most widely recognized constellation, with its easy to spot “belt” of three stars running across its mid-section.
Even more interesting, Orion is home to a gorgeous stellar nursery that 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 left-most star of its belt.