Orion Star Nursery

Hi my name is Massimo Robertto. I am a European Space Agency scientist working with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Your task is to make a 3D picture of one of the most amazing objects in our galaxy - the Orion Nebula.

The Orion Nebula is a vast cloud of gas and dust only 1,500 light years from Earth –that’s next door in space terms. It is in the same arm of the Milkyway that we are. It is also below us so that there are very few stars getting in the way of our view and very little behind it. The Orion Nebula is a very young object – no more than 10 million years old. So young that the massive stars at its centre have not had time to run out of fuel which they will do in only a few million years. There is no better place to study star formation. We have already taken at peek with the Hubble Space Telescope. Now I am planning a project that will use the HST to look at the Orion Nebula in even greater details to answer some of the many mysteries about star formation.

Take three images of the Orion Nebula in different wavelengths using HST’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2

The diagonal length of the image will be 1.6 light-years. To see the structure of the nebula, three filters are used which target the light given off by excited hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen atoms. The filter that isolates emission from Nitrogen is encoded in the red channel, Hydrogen is encoded is the green channel and Oxygen is encoded in the blue channel.

Save each image in your work file and then import them into Registax. Adjust the result until you see the greatest amount of detail.

RESULTS

Task still under construction

Click here to see our go at combining the images with RegiStax