The Sword of Orion Enhanced
by Weston Westmoreland
Title
The Sword of Orion Enhanced
Artist
Weston Westmoreland
Medium
Photograph - Photograph
Description
The Sword of Orion. Enhanced.
Infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope of the Orion nebula, our closest massive star-making factory, 1,450 light-years from Earth. The nebula is close enough to appear to the naked eye as a fuzzy star in the sword of the popular constellation.
The nebula itself is located on the lower half of the image, surrounded by a ring of dust. It formed in a cold cloud of gas and dust and contains about 1,000 young stars. These stars illuminate the cloud, creating the beautiful nebulosity, or swirls of material, seen here in infrared.
There are four monstrously massive stars in the center of the nebula, up to 100,000 times as luminous as our sun, called the Trapezium (tiny yellow smudge to the lower left of green splotches. Radiation and winds from these stars are blasting gas and dust away, excavating a cavity walled in by the large ring of dust. Behind the Trapezium, still buried deeply in the cloud, a second generation of massive stars is forming.
Above this region of intense activity are networks of cold material that appear as dark veins against the pinkish nebulosity. These dark veins contain embryonic stars. Some of the natal stars illuminate the cloud, creating small, aqua-colored wisps. In addition, jets of gas from the stars ram into the cloud, resulting in the green horseshoe-shaped globs.
Original image and text by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Toledo, further image enhancements and post processing by Weston Westmoreland.
More enhanced NASA/Hubble images one copy-paste away at https://weston-westmoreland.pixels.com/collections/astronomy
Weston Westmoreland
Uploaded
April 24th, 2021
Embed
Share