Orion Nebula
Nebula
The catalogue that supplied this record classes it as a star cluster with nebulosity.
A cloud of gas and dust where new stars are being formed, and the closest large star forming region to us.
Can you see it tonight?
Where are you?
To work out whether you can see this tonight, we need to know roughly where you are looking from. Your position stays in your browser: it is never sent to us, never stored and never shared.
Without it, everything else on this page still holds: what this object is, where it sits on the sky, and where every fact came from.
What it looks like
A photograph of this patch of sky, taken by a telescope on the ground. Orion Nebula sits in the middle, with the surrounding sky around it.
Brightness adjusted so faint detail shows. Every picture here is a rendering of the survey's measurements rather than a measurement itself, and this is the same setting for all of them.
- Position
- 83.81867, -5.38967Source: NASA Extragalactic Database
- Brightness
- about 4Source: OpenNGC
- Apparent size
- about 90 x 60 arcminutes
- Constellation
- Orion
- Catalogue name
- Great Orion Nebula
Catalogue designations
NGC1976, M42, LBN 974, MWSC 0582
Source: OpenNGC