Astrophoto: Beautiful New Look at the Orion Nebula

By Nancy Atkinson - March 27, 2013 at 10:15 PM UTC | Observing
m42.jpg

The enormous cloud of dust and gas that makes up the Orion Nebula is featured in this beautiful astrophoto. This image was a joint effort, with images taken by

Gary Gonnella

– a regular on our

Virtual Star Parties

– and image editing by

Paul Hutchinson.

Paul used the "Hubble Palette" – named for the Hubble Space Telescope and its capability of imaging in very narrow wavelengths of light using various filters. This enables astrophotographs to reveal details of objects in space that can't be seen by the human eye. Here, the filters used produced different colors: were Hydrogen Alpha=Green, S=Red, O=Blue. Paul said he combined two exposures, a 1 minute and 10 second exposure, to reduce the blow-out in the bright center of the nebula. The results are striking!

Compare this great image to another image of the Orion Nebula, recently taken by the WISE telescope (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer), below.

Colors in this image represents specific infrared wavelengths. Blue represents light emitted at 3.4-micron wavelengths and cyan (blue-green) represents 4.6 microns, both of which come mainly from hot stars. Relatively cooler objects, such as the dust of the nebulae, appear green and red. Green represents 12-micron light and red represents 22-micron light.

[caption id="attachment_101050" align="aligncenter" width="580"]

The Orion Nebula as seen by the WISE telescope. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA[/caption]

The Orion nebula is part of the larger Orion molecular cloud complex, which also includes the Flame nebula. This region is actively making new stars.

Want to get your astrophoto featured on Universe Today? Join our Flickr group or send us your images by email (this means you're giving us permission to post them). Please explain what's in the picture, when you took it, the equipment you used, etc.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com