Illustration — we do not hold a photograph of this object

Great Orion Nebula

Emission nebula in Orion

An object in the observing catalogue.

Also catalogued as Great Orion Nebula, M42, Messier 42, NGC 1976, Orion Nebula

Measurements and positionShow
Position
Right ascension 05h 35m 16.5s Declination −05° 23′ 23″J2000
Where the object sits on the sky, in the coordinate system astronomers use. Right ascension is the east–west figure and declination the north–south one; J2000 names the reference date they are measured against.
Brightness
4.00
Apparent magnitude. The scale runs backwards — a smaller number is brighter, and around 6 is roughly the faintest the unaided eye can see from a dark site.
Apparent size
90.0 arcminutes
How large the object looks from here, not how large it is. The full Moon is about 30 arcminutes across, which is a useful thing to compare against.

Catalogue data from OpenNGC (Mattia Verga) · CC-BY-SA-4.0