The Orion Nebula is a massive nearby stellar nursery and one of
the most dramatic sights you can see through any telescope.
M43 or De Mairan's Nebula is the "Ying" shaped nebulosity in the bottom left of the image,
whilst M42 is the remaining bowl shaped nebulosity covering the rest of the frame.
The Orion Nebula is a small but remarkably vibrant part of the surrounding OMC-1 giant
molecular cloud complex that pervades the constellation of Orion.
This is a narrowband image, it uses the "hubble palette" for the false colour mapping
used to represent the different elemental abundances of gases within the nebula
(Red = Sulphur II, Green = Hydrogen Alpha, Blue = Oxygen III).
The colours are balanced to approximately normalize the brightness contribution of each element
within the image.
Without this adjustment the image would be overwhelminly green due to the predominant signal
from ionized Hydrogen gas.
