To get this amazing picture of Orion took 212 hours of exposure time and a year of processing. But look at it! The link is to the page, not just the image, because if you run the cursor over it, the nebulae and stars are identified. There is also more information in the caption.

(Image Credit & Copyright: Stanislav Volskiy, Rollover Annotation: Judy Schmidt)

After soaking up the beauty of the image on my previous posting, you can find out more about Orion the Hunter by clicking on the link.

The stars of Orion have been part of humanity's mythscape for thousands of years. Seven bright stars outline the hunter's body. One of them is a supergiant nearing the end of its life. Yet just visible to the unaided eye is a vast stellar nursery where the next generation of stars is forming.

The constellations Andromeda and Pegaus are reflected in Crater Lake, Oregon in this serene photo taken by Wally Pacholka/Astropics.com

Near the left-hand edge, about halfway up from the lake, is something slightly elongated and fuzzy. That isn't a star out of focus, but the Andromeda Galaxy (M31). It's a large spiral galaxy and the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way. It's about 2.5 million light years away, which is neighborly in astronomical terms. In several billion years our galaxy and M31 will collide.

Part of the constellation of Pegasus is an asterism called the Great Square of Pegasus. In this dark sky there are so many stars you may find it hard to pick out this square. It will help to think of it as a large diamond. Each tip of the diamond is a bright star. It's slightly to the right of center and it is a very big diamond. The best help is to look at the lake where the diamond is quite prominent.

Want to know the difference between an asterism and a constellation?

Andromeda the Chained Princess is part of a famous classical story which takes up a large portion of the sky. Sometimes artists show Pegasus the Winged Horse as part of the story, but in fact he has his own story.

The constellation Mensa is one most people haven't ever heard of. This isn't surprising, since this southern hemisphere constellation is the faintest in the sky. Its only notable feature is that it contains part of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.

The French astronomer Nicolas-Louis Lacaille created the constellation. Its original name was Mons Mensae (Table Mountain) after Table Mountain near Cape Town, South Africa where Lacaille made his survey of the southern stars. I think it was his little joke - the LMC stands in for the clouds often seen on the earthly mountaintop.

Lacaille's Skies - Arts tells you more about some of Lacaille's constellatioins.

This apparently other-worldly image isn't an artist's view of an exoplanet. It's a photo taken in the Canary Islands, a view across the top of Tenerife toward La Palma. The Teide volcano is on the horizon. In the sky you can see Orion - look for the three belt stars. There's still winter snow there, adding accents to the landscape. You can also see the telescope of a robotic observatory which is a prototype for the Stellar Observations Network Group (SONG).

Image Credit & Copyright: Mads Fredslund Andersen, Stellar Astrophysics Centre, Aarhus Univ., Denmark

Here's a splendid mosaic of the Orion constellation by Derrick Lam. [click to enlarge] The camera picks up the colors more vividly than our eyes do.

Text: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)