The Orion nebula, a glowing gas cloud studded with brilliant young stars, was discovered in the sword of Orion by Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc just one year after Galileo first looked at the night sky through a telescope. Ever since then, astronomers have hastened to train every new kind of instrument on this spectacular stellar nursery. So that's what NASA did last December, just after the second‐generation Wide Field‐Planetary Camera was put aboard the Hubble Space Telescope by visiting astronauts. (See PHYSICS TODAY, March, page 42.) Outfitted with corrective optics designed to compensate for the much‐lamented flaw in Hubble's primary mirror, the new camera was promptly pointed at a portion of the Orion nebula that its predecessor had imaged two years earlier.

Topics
Circumstellar disks, Interstellar clouds, Nebulae, Space telescope, Orion, Astronauts, Astronomers, National Aeronautics and Space Administration
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© 1994 American Institute of Physics.
1994
American Institute of Physics
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