Orion’s Belt or the Three Sisters: next time you see that familiar line of three bright stars, the…

Orion’s Belt or the Three Sisters: next time you see that familiar line of three bright stars, the “Orion’s Belt” asterism at the center of the constellation Orion, imagine the backdrop of ionized hydrogen and all the other surrounding stuff you can’t see with your eyes, the bright nebulae, the dark structures of dust and molecular gasses, vast stellar nurseries with violent new stars forming out of trillions of kilometers of hydrogen clouds. There’s so much going on behind these three stars. The center of the Belt, Alnilam, is a single massive star, a supergiant that’s 375,000 times brighter than our star. Alnitak is a triple star system, and Mintaka is a binary star, with the two stars orbiting each other every 5.7 days.

Imaging Notes: 60 x 5-minute exposures stacked in PI, ZWO ASI2600MM-Pro monochrome camera cooled to -10C, 3nm Antlia Pro Hydrogen-alpha filter, William Optics SpaceCat 51 apo refractor, Sky-Watcher EQ6-R Pro mount. Shot from my backyard in coastal New Hampshire, bortle 4-ish.