The Orion Nebula in all it's glory from ESO's new VISTA telescope: Image credit ESO
10th February 2010.
The famous Orion Nebula (M42) is a favourite with amateur astronomers, being very bright it can even be seen with small binoculars glowing in the sword of Orion. It’s a jewel of the sky, a vast cloud of gas and dust that shines bright from the light of massive and newly formed stars born within it.
The Orion Nebula is probably the most photographed of all deep sky objects, but this spectacular infrared image from the European Southern Observatory’s new VISTA survey telescope(the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) takes some beating. This telescope lifts away the veil of obscuring dust, uncovering details deep inside the nebula with it’s infrared vision. This dust is normally a hindrance in telescopes operating in the visible part of the spectrum, as it shrouds a lot of the activity going on behind these dusty regions.
Intricate details and patterns can be seen in the nebula such as long streamers of gas, cavities, and dark and red blobs of dust. The whole nebula complex is being sculptured by the fierce stellar winds eminating from the young stars. The image is dominated though by a tight and very young cluster called the Trapezium at it’s heart. The Trapezium is noted by it’s four brightest stars, infant suns 15 to 20 times the mass of our Sun, and crammed in just 1.5 light years of each other. The Trapezium is the strongest source of illumination for the Orion nebula and shines bright in this image.
ESO’s new VISTA Telescope is the biggest survey telescope in the world, has a 4.1 metre mirror, dedicated to mapping the sky in infrared, and has a wide field of view.
