“He who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning, and darkens the day into night, who calls for the waters of the sea, and pours them out upon the surface of the earth, the Lord is his name” Amos 5:8
I woke up before dawn a few days ago and seeing that I had a clear view of the constellation Orion the Hunter high in the eastern sky, I took my smart telescope out and caught some great pictures of the deep-sky objects in Orion’s Sword, an asterism that can be seen by the naked eye below Orion’s belt.
Here are the pictures, followed by a description of the four deep-sky objects shown in them. The constellation Orion, by the way, is mentioned four times in the Sacred Scriptures. Three times it is mentioned with the Pleiades (Job 9:8-9, 38:31-33; Amos 5:8) and two of those instances include Canis Major, the Bear. The fourth instance is in the Book of the Prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 13:10), where the Hebrew word for Orion, כְּסִיל (“keh-SEEL”), is used in the plural to designate constellations in general (Wigram 608).
From the top right to the bottom left of the spliced image above:
NGC 1981 is an open cluster which is located in the constellation Orion. just north of the Running Man Nebula Complex (Sh2-279). NGC 1981 is not considered to be part of Orion’s Sword, but I am including it here.
The Running Man Nebula Complex (Sh2-279) is composed of three nebulae: NGC 1973, NGC 1975, and NGC 1977. They are emission and reflection nebulae located about 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Orion.
The Orion Nebula (also known as Messier 42, M42, or NGC 1976) is a diffuse nebula known as the middle “star” in Orion’s Sword. It is about 25 light-years across and is about 1,267 light-years from Earth.
NGC 1980 is a young open cluster of stars that is associated with an emission nebula in the constellation Orion. It is also known as The Lost Jewel of Orion and sits at the southern tip of Orion’s Sword. It is about 1,800 light-years from Earth and is roughly 4.7 million years old.
Individual images:
