Emission nebula
Orion Nebula (M42)
In Orion (Ori) • Magnitude 4.0 • 1.4 degrees
Open the free AstroPlanner with Orion Nebula pre-selected, scored against your telescope, location, and the live cloud forecast.
The most studied nebula in the sky and the nearest major star-forming region to Earth at just 1,344 light-years — easily visible as a fuzzy patch in Orion's sword with the naked eye. Buried within it is the Trapezium, a tight grouping of young, massive stars whose intense radiation is currently sculpting hundreds of new planetary systems in the surrounding gas cloud.
Orion Nebula at a glance
| Catalog IDs | M42, N 1976 |
| Type | Emission nebula |
| Constellation | Orion (Ori) |
| Right ascension | 05h 35m 24s |
| Declination | -05° 23' 24" |
| Apparent magnitude | 4.00 |
| Surface brightness | 13.0 mag/arcsec² |
| Angular size | 85.0 × 60.0 arcmin |
| Max altitude at 45°N | 40° |
| Best imaging months | Sep, Oct, Nov |
How to image Orion Nebula
Orion Nebula sits in the constellation Orion at right ascension 05h 35m 24s and declination -05° 23' 24". To frame and integrate it well, AstroPlanner will compute the optimal moonless window for tonight from your location, the field-of-view fit against your sensor and focal length, the suggested total integration time given your aperture and sky Bortle class, and a cloud-aware schedule that drops it from the plan if your nearest cloud forecast spike overlaps the best altitude window. As an emission nebula, Orion Nebula responds very well to dual-narrowband filters under city skies.