ORION. Holy Wow, Orion.

At a distance of 1,300 light years --just 13,000 trillion kilometers, which is close on a galactic scale--the Orion Nebula is one of the most magnificent objects in the sky. It's so luminous that you can see it by eye even in mildly light polluted areas, and when you use binoculars you can tell it's not a star, but something fuzzy and big, hinting at its true nature. That nature comes into clarity when the nebula is photographed using a telescope. That reveals it to be an immense cloud of gas an...