✳ Orion Nebula

  Orion Nebula is a nebula in Orion.

  Type            Nebula
  Constellation   Orion
  Magnitude       11.0
  Apparent size   85′ × 60′ (3× the full Moon)

  Known as
  Messier         M42
  Dreyer          NGC 1976

  Physical
  Distance        1,344 light years
  Age             under a million years, and still forming stars

  More information about Orion Nebula

  The middle point of light in Orion's sword is not a star at all. It is
  the Orion Nebula, a cloud of gas and dust 24 light years across with new
  stars condensing inside it, and it is the nearest such place to us. Four
  of those new stars, close together at the centre and known as the
  Trapezium, are what light the whole cloud up. Binoculars show its shape
  clearly and a small telescope starts to show the wisps and folds in it.

  History
  Discovered           1610, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc
  First photographed   1880, Henry Draper, the first photograph of any nebula

  Messier was hunting comets. He compiled his list between 1758 and 1781
  as a register of things that look like comets but are not. That's why
  the objects on it have nothing in common beyond being fuzzy and staying
  put.

  Dreyer compiled the New General Catalogue in 1888, mostly from the
  sweeps William and John Herschel made of the sky, and numbered its 7,840
  objects in order of right ascension.

  where it is tonight:  skymap.sh/Orion Nebula