The Trapezium Jan 2014

The Great Orion Nebula: Messier 42
an image taken from our backyard
January 2014

My last image of Orion this winter is of the central area of the Great Orion Nebula. Not the best image or the most colorful ever taken of this fascinating area of the night sky, but processed to provide a more realistic view of what can be seen through the eyepiece of a small to medium sized telescope.

The Nebula, M42, is a large region of diffuse dust and gas covering one degree of the sky as viewed from the Earth.  It is part of the much larger but less visible Orion Molecular Cloud Complex which extends throughout the constellation of Orion the Hunter.  M42 includes: neutral clouds of gas and dust, young stars, ionised volumes of gas and reflection nebulae. The Nebula, some 24 light years across and 1350 light years distant from Earth, is an example of a stellar nursery where stars are being formed from the gravitational collapse of gas and dust.

To the eye, the Nebula glows in green light with hints of red, violet and blue. The green light results from doubly ionised oxygen, the red from ionised hydrogen and the violet and blue from the reflected radiation from hot blue stars. 

At the centre of the my photograph is the bright association of hot young blue stars known as the 'Trapezium'. The stars are more clearly visible in the image below courtesy of the European Southern Observatory.  Be fair they have bigger and better scopes and cameras at higher altitude and a team of engineers and scientists with skill sets and patience I will never have!

This photo shows a colour composite mosaic image of the central part of the Orion Nebula, based on 81 images obtained with the infrared multi-mode ISAAC instrument on the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory. The famous Trapezium stars are seen near the centre and the photo also shows the associated cluster of about 1,000 stars, approximately a million years old. 

Credits:Wikipedia and ESO