Astrophotography

On Wednesday November 1 the stars of the Orion constellation will begin to rise almost directly to the east around 10pm here. Rising slightly earlier each consecutive night, The Hunter has long been one of the most important asterisms in the night sky, used for both tracking the seasons and navigation by many cultures. The three stars of the Belt often define various interpretations of what our ancestors saw. For example, Chinese astrology refers to the lunar mansions Shen meaning ‘three,’ and Bugis sailors from Indonesia use Tanra Tellué or the ‘sign of three’ for sailing. The Scandinavian goddess Frigg was envisioned holding a distaff, and the Finns viewed the three stars as the scythe of Väinämöinen. The Lakota people of North America see these same three stars as the spine of a bison, and the surrounding stars filling out the body, with the nearby Pleiades as the bison’s head.

Hanging below the belt are three more stars, often depicted as the sword or scabbard of the Hunter. The center of these is more than just a star and is one of the few non-stellar objects we can see with the naked eye. At an apparent magnitude of 4.0, the Orion Nebula is the closest star-forming region to us. In the late 19th century doctor and amateur astronomer Henry Draper pioneered astrophotography, first photographing the moon in 1840, the transit of Venus in 1874, and choosing the Orion Nebula as his first deep-sky target in 1880.

One “giant leap for mankind” was the successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in December 2021, which has continued this work of imaging the cosmos. Recently turning its attention to the Orion Nebula, the sensitive infrared instruments on the James Webb, combined with data from Hubble and ground-based observatories, reveal something we have never seen or predicted in space: JuMBO planets. Jupiter-Mass Binary Objects are large planets that seem to have formed separately from the standard model of solar systems, and 40 distinct pairs have been observed across this 24-light-year-wide stretch of space. As big as Jupiter or even larger, they are not quite massive enough to ignite fusion and become stars, but they found mates in the darkness of space and these rogue planets now orbit each other.

Your backyard scope may not be able to resolve distant JuMBOs, but you can certainly use it to take a cellphone image of the Orion Nebula. Using an adapter or even just placing your camera against your eyepiece, you can capture the beauty of the nebula from your own back yard.