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. This detailed image of the Orion Nebula is the sharpest
ever, constructed using data from the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys and
the European Southern Observatory's La Silla 2.2 meter telescope. The mosaic contains a billion
pixels at full resolution and reveals about 3,000 stars. In apparent size, the picture is as
large as the Full Moon. At the distance of M42 it spans thirteen light-years.