Orion Nebula: The Hubble View

Few cosmic vistas excite the imagination like the Orion Nebula . Also known as M42 , the nebula's glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1,500 light-years away. The Orion Nebula offers one of the best opportunities to study how stars are born partly because it is the nearest large star-forming region , but also because the nebula's energetic stars have blown away obscuring gas and dust clouds that would otherwise block our view - providing an intimate look at a range of ongoing stages of starbirth and evolution. The featured image of the Orion Nebula is among the sharpest ever, constructed using data from the Hubble Space Telescope . The entire Orion Nebula spans about 40 light year s and is located in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun .