NIGHT OVER ONTARIO

The Running Man nebula and M42 'star factory' in Orion.
LHaRGB with TEC140 Af7 and ML8300 camera. Taken by Lynn Hilborn, WhistleStop Observatory, Grafton,Ontario...Feb9 and11, 2012.
Sub exposures ranged from 10 seconds to 20 minutes in order to capture the full dynamic range.

A recurring theme of destruction, upheaval, birth and rebirth occurs within the spiral arms of galaxies. HII regions within the spiral arms of galaxies serve as celestial recycling stations where the birth of new stars completes a great cycle, creating and recycling matter, ultimately enriching and replenishing the interstellar medium with heavier elements. These heavier elements may potentially become the building blocks of terrestrial planets and ultimately living organisms. The Orion Nebula is arguably the greatest of all HII clouds visible from our location within the Milky Way. With a gaseous repository of 10,000 suns, and illuminated by a cluster of hot young stars, the clouds of M42 glow with fantastic colors and shapes, giving us a birds eye view of one of the greatest star forming nurseries in our part of the galaxy.

The radiance and beauty of Orion transcends dry astronomical facts, however the history as well as the physics and chemistry of the Orion Nebula is a tale worthy of telling that helps us understand the nebula's great significance. M42 is a complex cloud of glowing gas, mostly hydrogen but also helium, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen in decreasing amounts. Although a true astronomical icon, M42 is essentially a bright condensation of the Orion A Molecular Cloud which extends far beyond the Orion Nebula. Although it spans 40 light years, the ionized gas of M42 is an exceptionally thin blister only 0.08 light years thick on the surface of the larger and optically invisible molecular cloud.

Directly in front of M42 is a small grouping of hot O and B type stars known as the trapezium which shine between 5th and 8th magnitude. This grouping represents the 4 brightest members of an extended cluster of several thousand young stars many of which lie unseen within the opaque gas and dust. The bright trapezium grouping represents the cluster core where stars are packed so tight they exceed the stellar concentration of our suns vicinity some 20,000 times. Stars within the trapezium are separated by only 0.12 light years whereas our sun's nearest neighbor is 4 light years away. Text was written by Robert Gendler, and is used with his kind permission.