Looking at Orion is more than just looking at an area that is easy to recognize in the night sky. Orion is seething with activity and illustrates a clear and concise picture, of how stars are formed. It gives us the ability to compare different types of stars and most importantly, it's right next door to Earth, astronomically speaking.

The interest in Orion is currently at frenzy level, astronomers have always been interested in Orion because it is only 450 parsecs (1500 light years) from Earth. As viewed from ground based telescopes, Orion has twice the angular diameter of the full moon, around 1 degree. Known as the saucepan, Orion has a most distinctive and easy to find star pattern, located in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun. Orion is named after the Hunter of Greek mythology.

If what we can see of Orion is considered exciting, that pales under the stark reality of what lies in the same region, that we can not see. To understand more about the differences in Orion, you must establish that there are differences between two sets of stars, the visible and the non-visible.

The image above shows the distinctive blue/white colour of Rigel and t

Star formation reproduces via a chain reaction. In a simplified cycle, young hot stars blow gas outward, then expanding gas compresses molecular cloud dense cores causing these cores to collapse to form new young hot stars. This cycle repeats right throughout the molecular cloud that constitutes the stellar nursery. All this is invisible to human eyes.

Differences in star colours are shown in the photo on the left of the constellation Orion. Made using a "star trail step-focus" technique. This is a time exposure method used to create star trails in altered steps.

The next visual difference comes from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) orbiting high above the Earth's distorting atmosphere, where a totally different picture emerges (see image on the left, above). This shows Orion in a previously unimaginable view, with clearly differing nebulosity. If that was not spectacular enough, along comes Hubbles NICMOS (Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer). This now lets us 'see' with the aid of technology where our human eyes can not.

So in essence as viewed from earth with the naked eye, the middle star in the handle of the saucepan appears as one white star, it is smaller in size than both the bluish Rigel to the left and the reddish Betelgeuse on the right of the image above. The dark background of space also leads the human eye to see these most luminous stars as very bright, even though the stars are actually at different distances to us, and are different sizes and temperatures. We see the Orion constellation as a flat two-dimensional image, when in fact it really is a multidimensional portion of the universe, aligned conveniently for us to view.

Some common words found in the essay are:
Orion Nebula, Multi-Object Spectrometer, Nebula KL, Looking Orion, K-L Nebula, Hunter Greek, Trapezium Theta, Telescope HST, Nebula Stars, Bright Rigel, stars orion, orion nebula, orion constellation, hot stars, orion looking, infrared camera multi-object, typical star, near infrared, infrared camera, supergiant betelgeuse, aid technology, cool red supergiant, near infrared camera, red supergiant betelgeuse, camera multi-object spectrometer,
Approximate Word count = 1452
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)