Star nurseries in the Night: From Orion’s Fire to the Elephant’s Shadow
There are evenings when South Wales does what South Wales does best — rain, more rain, and a theatrical amount of brooding cloud. And then, just for a moment on Tuesday evening, the curtain lifted. I was ready. A brief spell of clear sky opened above Pontypool, and I set up the Dwarf 3 Digital Telescope toward two very different stellar nurseries: the mighty Orion Nebula and the haunting Elephant's Trunk Nebula . The Orion Nebula never disappoints. Even through shifting air and the glow of nearby towns, it burns with a kind of quiet defiance. Sitting around 1,344 light-years away, this vast cloud of gas and dust is a genuine stellar maternity ward. New stars are forming inside it right now. At its heart lies the Trapezium Cluster — a tight knot of young, massive stars whose intense ultraviolet radiation is carving and sculpting the surrounding gas like cosmic weather systems. What we see as pinks and reds in photographs comes from ionised hydrogen atoms excited by starlight, re-em...
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