Messier 42 - The Great Orion Nebula Wide Field

Lying only 1,500 light years away, the Great Orion Nebula, Messier 42 (M42), is the closest large star-forming region to our home planet. One of the only emission nebulas visible to the naked eye, the Mayans believed it to be the fire of creation. And indeed it is, hosting numerous young stars surrounded by proto-planetary discs. It forms the brightest part of Orion's sword. M42 is also catalogued as Sh2-281 in Stewart Sharpless's list of HII regions.

But there's a lot more than just the Orion Nebula in this image. Nestled up to its left is de Mairan's Nebula (M43). There's a closer shot of this pair here on this website. At roughly four o'clock from M42, you can also see NGC 1999 (aka vdB 46), the Keyhole Nebula and its neighbors IC 427 & 428. I've posted a closeup image of that area as well.

One of the things I have yet to document here is NGC 1973, 1975, and 1977 (Sh2-279), the Running Man Nebula. It appears to the left of M42 and M43 in the image. It comprises both reflection (light reflected from bright stars) and also emission (light given off by ionized gas) regions.

Near the center, at the very top of the frame, you can spot vdB 42, a small reflection nebula.

And yet another reflection nebula from Sydney van den Bergh's catalogue, vdB 44, is slightly lower and farther to the left of vdB 42.

This image is a bit of a happy accident. I shot it with the small ZenithStar 61 refractor from my back yard in 2022 as part of a much larger mosaic. But revisiting the data early in 2026 revealed that its quality was much better than I had thought. So I put some effort into reframing and reprocessing it to produce the image you see here.