One of the sure-fire objects in the night sky that will get anyone turned on to the hobby of stargazing is the great Orion Nebula, a gargantuan stellar factory.

I guarantee you'll say “Wow” when you train a telescope on it for the first time, even with the smallest of telescopes or binoculars. With just the naked eye you'll see it as a “fuzzy star.”

To find the Orion nebula, look for the bright constellation Orion the Hunter in the early evening, hanging in the south-southwestern Butler sky as darkness sets it. You can't miss it. Orion is one of those few constellations that actually resembles what it's supposed to be.

Start your search for the great Orion Nebula by looking below those three bright stars in a row that make up the mighty Hunter's belt. Just to the lower left of Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, you'll see another but fainter row of three stars lined up that make up Orion's sword. The Orion nebula is that fuzzy middle star of the sword. It's more than 1,500 light-years away, with just one light-year equaling almost 6 trillion miles.

Hold out one of your thumbs at arm's length toward the Orion nebula. Your thumbnail should easily cover up this giant cloud of hydrogen gas, over 30 light-years in diameter. That's almost 180 trillion miles in girth, or about 20,000 times the diameter of our solar system.

Unfortunately, our eyes, even though a telescope, are not sensitive enough to see the color and detail that celestial photographs display but you'll still like what you see through your telescope, even a smaller scope.

You may see that the Orion nebula has a greenish tinge to it. You'll also notice four stars that are arranged in a lopsided trapezoid. If your telescope is larger you may see a fifth star. Those stars, and many, many others that you can't see, were all born out of the Orion Nebula. In fact, that giant cloud of gas could produce many more stars in the future, maybe even another 10,000 stars the size of our sun.

The four stars that make up the Trapezium are very young, hot stars that are on average about 300,000 years old. One of the stars is estimated to have a surface temperature of 72,000 degrees F, more than seven times the temperature of our sun.

All that heat and radiation pouring out of these four stars and others cause the surrounding hydrogen gas to glow like a giant neon light. Astronomers refer to this kind of nebula as an emission nebula.

The Hubble telescope, which is a little better than most backyard telescopes, has even detected developing solar systems around some of the stars of the Orion Nebula, but these potential planets may not come into being. Stellar winds gusting at over 2 million mph are constantly blasting away any semblance of developing planet families. In fact, tremendous stellar wind currents from several stars can collide to cause a perfect cosmic storm, otherwise known as complete celestial chaos.Your thumb nail is covering all of that.Celestial hugging this weekBeginning on Tuesday in the early morning south-southeast sky, the waning crescent moon will pass by the planets Jupiter and Saturn and snuggle up to the bright planet Venus. It will be quite a show.<em>Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is also the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and at adventurepublications.net. Contact Mike Lynch at mikewlynch@comcast.net.</em>

The Orion Nebula is a giant cloud of hydrogen gas more than 1,500 light-years away.