Hubble Captures Orion Nebula’s Mesmerizing Colorful ‘Cloud’

If anybody is still so naive to think that NASA doesn’t need the Hubble telescope anymore as long as it has James Webb, they are so wrong! The good ol’ three-decades-old telescope is once again under the spotlight thanks to a new mesmerizing photo of beautiful clouds from the Orion Nebula that it captured.

The Orion Nebula is located roughly 1,350 light years away from Earth. What we’ll have under the spotlight in the image that makes the subject of this article is a colorful region that surrounds the Herbig-Haro object HH 505.

The Orion Nebula is also known as Messier 42, and you can consider it as the stellar nursery that’s the nearest to our planet. Orion is even part of a larger stellar structure, which is known as the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex (or simply the Orion Complex). Due to the spectacular images that it provides, the nebula remains a major interest for astronomers who are willing to take photos of the Cosmos.

An interesting fact about the Orion Nebula is that it can even be seen with the naked eye, according to NASA. That’s possible because the stellar nursery has a magnitude of +4.

NASA sent the Hubble Space Telescope into Earth’s orbit in 1990, meaning over three decades ago. The telescope received its name after the American astronomer Edwin Hubble, who made huge discoveries back in the 1920s. he was the one to discover that there are far more galaxies out there except for our Milky Way galaxy. He also concluded that the Universe is going through a permanent expansion, which contradicted the generally accepted idea at that time that the Cosmos is static.

NASA’s next-generation James Webb Space Telescope, which was released in December 2021, is considered the successor of Hubble. While many thought that there won’t be any room left for Hubble to continue its work, it’s great to see that they weren’t right.