---
title: "Orion Nebula: facts, distance and size – Krillion Space"
description: "The Orion Nebula is a glowing cloud of gas and dust in Orion's sword and the closest large region of massive star formation to Earth. With sourced facts."
url: https://krilion.app/atlas/orion-nebula
language: en-US
---

# Orion Nebula

Stellar nursery. Depth 33 on the Krillion Space voyage, in the Milky Way.

The Orion Nebula is a glowing cloud of gas and dust in Orion's sword and the closest large region of massive star formation to Earth. Hundreds of young stars, many brown dwarfs and planet-forming disks make it one of the best places to watch stars being born.

![The Orion Nebula at depth 33 in Krillion Space, from a Hubble photo (NASA and C.R. O'Dell).](https://krilion.app/assets/atlas/orion-nebula.webp)

## Fact sheet

- **Type:** Emission nebula (H II region) around a young star cluster
- **Distance:** About 1,300 light-years from the Sun (estimates range from about 1,270 to 1,350)
- **Size:** About 24 light-years across
- **Constellation:** Orion
- **Position in the sky:** Right ascension 5h 35m, declination −5° 23′
- **Seeing it from Earth:** Visible to the naked eye from a reasonably dark site as a fuzzy patch below Orion's belt, best in the evening sky around January (northern winter); binoculars or a small telescope show the glowing gas and the Trapezium stars.
- **On the voyage:** Depth 33, in the Milky Way section of the route, between Betelgeuse and the Ring Nebula

## Things to know

- The nebula is the nearest large star-forming region to Earth, and at its heart sits the Trapezium, four massive young stars whose ultraviolet light shapes the cloud. ([NASA](https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/science/explore-the-night-sky/hubble-messier-catalog/messier-42/))
- Deep infrared images from ESO's Very Large Telescope released in 2016 revealed about ten times as many brown dwarfs and planet-sized free-floating objects as had been known there. ([ESO](https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1625/))
- Hubble's sharpest view of the nebula was stitched together from 520 separate exposures and holds more than a billion pixels. ([NASA](https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/science/explore-the-night-sky/hubble-messier-catalog/messier-42/))
- The James Webb Space Telescope has studied the Orion Bar, a ridge where ultraviolet light from the Trapezium eats into dense gas, and found a planet-forming disk there called d203-506. ([NASA](https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/skywatching/night-sky-network/a-flame-in-the-sky-the-orion-nebula/))
- You can find it with your eyes alone as a fuzzy patch in Orion's sword, just below the three stars of the belt. ([NASA](https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/skywatching/night-sky-network/a-flame-in-the-sky-the-orion-nebula/))

## Sources

- [NASA Science (Hubble) – Messier 42 (The Orion Nebula)](https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/science/explore-the-night-sky/hubble-messier-catalog/messier-42/)
- [ESO – Deepest Ever Look into Orion (eso1625)](https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1625/)
- [NASA Night Sky Network – A Flame in the Sky: The Orion Nebula](https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/skywatching/night-sky-network/a-flame-in-the-sky-the-orion-nebula/)
- [Kuhn et al. 2019, ApJ – Kinematics in Young Star Clusters and Associations with Gaia DR2 (arXiv)](https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.02115)

## On the route

- Previous landmark: [Betelgeuse](https://krilion.app/atlas/betelgeuse)
- Next landmark: [Ring Nebula](https://krilion.app/atlas/ring-nebula)
- [The whole Star Atlas](https://krilion.app/atlas)
- [Fly the voyage yourself](https://krilion.app/d/): every right answer warps your ship one stop deeper.