What do you see when you look up into the nighttime sky? For centuries humans have
seen imaginary animals, people, or mythological beings in the patterns and shapes
of star groupings. Ancient stargazers gave names to these groupings, the
constellations we know today. These names give us a way to organize and locate the
6,000 stars and the galaxies, nebulae, and other celestial phenomena we can see with
the naked eye.
The constellation Orion can be seen from both hemispheres. To the Greeks the star
pattern formed a hunter anchored on the main star, Betelgeuse. To the Pawnee Indians
of the Great Plains these stars represented deer. In the early 17th century, an
amateur astronomer pointed a telescope skyward and saw a gray cloud of gas and
dustthe nebula in Orions scabbard. Today, with the Hubble Space
Telescope, we see previously unimagined details of whorls and swirls in this
cloud of gas and dustthe Orion Nebula.