The Great Nebula in Orion, an immense, nearby starbirth region, is probably the most famous of all astronomical nebulas. Here, glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1500 light-years away. In the above deep image, faint wisps and sheets of dust and gas are particularly evident. The Great Nebula in Orion can be found with the unaided eye just below and to the left of the easily identifiable belt of three stars in the popular constellation Orion. In addition to housing a bright open cluster of stars known as the Trapezium, the Orion Nebula contains many stellar nurseries. These nurseries contain hydrogen gas, hot young stars, proplyds, and stellar jets spewing material at high speeds. Also known as M42, the Orion Nebula spans about 40 light years and is located in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun. The blue nebula above M42 is NGC1977, also named the running man nebula (text adapted from APOD).

To compose this picture data taken with two different telescopes (980mm and 1800mm FL) were blended together. Furthermore, due to the extreme dynamic range of M42, a set of short exposure shots were taken to recover core details. Click here to get two poster style larger images of the whole frame and a crop of the core