How To Locate Orion’s Belt

Conveniently, if you follow the line extending through Orion’s belt from your right to your left, you will soon “run into” Sirius. Procyon is also a very bright star and sits in the “little dog” off the Betelgeuse side of Orion’s upper body. Orion is part of the “Winter Hexagon” mentioned previously.

• Out of 88 of these constellations, Orion is one of the most famous.
• These were invented – perhaps “imagined” is a better word – by the ancient Greeks, as one might infer from the number of figures in Greek mythology that are represented in the constellations.
• The brightest of these objects, the Orion Nebula (Messier 42), lies below Orion’s Belt and is part of an asterism known as Orion’s Sword.
• The names include the Weighing Beam in Chinese and Al Nijād (the Belt), Al Nasak (the Line), Al Alkāt (the Golden Grains/Nuts) and Al Mīzān al Ḥaqq (the Accurate Scale Beam) in Arabic.
• If you join the dots – stars, in this case – and use your imagination, the picture would look like an object, animal, or person.
• Since Orion’s Belt asterism has been a major fixture in the night sky even in the past, people from around the world have given it different names and related it to their mythology and culture.

σ Orionis

Even without our telescopes and binoculars, we can still enjoy the spectacle of our night sky. There are many interesting facts about this asterism that goes beyond time and culture, so let us dive deep into it. Dive into the world of stargazing with our comprehensive guide to the constellations! 🌠 Find out everything you need to know about star patterns you see in the night sky. Alnilam is a supergiant at around 2.000 light-years away from Earth, located in the middle of the belt. Alnitak is the second closest star to us from Orion’s belt at a distance of 1.260 light-years.

Earth

• Even though Alnilam is the most distant of the three stars, it appears the brightest because it is the most massive and therefore the most intrinsically luminous of the Belt stars.
• The three bright blue stars – Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka – outline the belt in the constellation figure of the celestial Hunter.
• Mintaka, Delta Orionis (δ Ori), is the rightmost star of Orion’s Belt (leftmost when seen from the southern hemisphere).
• They are believed to be there to project the pharaoh’s soul toward Orion.
• These are A- and B-type supergiant stars that experience non-radial pulsations.
• A complex of about 16 pyramids near the ancient city of Xi’an in China features three pyramids that align similarly to the stars of Orion’s Belt.
• Since Orion’s Belt is in the celestial equator, the three stars are easily seen from both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

Some parts of their surfaces are contracting while others simultaneously expand. The pulsations cause the brightness to vary by about 0.1 magnitudes. Alnilam’s brightness has been observed to vary from magnitude 1.64 to 1.74. O-type stars are the hottest, bluest, and most massive types of stars, as well as the most short-lived. Because of their high mass, they burn through their supply of hydrogen faster than Sun-like stars. Even though it has only a Orion’s Bet fraction of the Sun’s age, Alnitak is already in the final stages of its life cycle.

Orion correlation theory

But note that on a cosmic scale, “close together” means a few light-years away. That’s how far light spreads and when it finally reaches us, it appears as one bright dot. Out of 88 of these constellations, Orion is one of the most famous. It’s a bunch of stars that together, look like a hunter with a club and a shield. Greek travelers staring into the night sky cooked up all sorts of stories about what the stars meant and represented.

Bright stars in the Orion constellation

The blue giant star Rigel (Beta Orionis) enjoys less notoriety than Betelgeuse, but it is easier to say (“RYE-jel”) and it claims the honor of being the 7th-brightest star in the heavens. The striking constellation is located near the celestial equator, with the right belt star δ Ori even exactly at ¼° (the angle will reach zero around 2080). Therefore, Orion is visible from late autumn to the beginning of spring in both hemispheres. In the star chart convention used since the 18th century, it lies between the river Eridanus and the Unicorn. All three stars are several times larger and brighter than our sun. The faint Monoceros (the Unicorn) appears east of Alnitak.
Its surface is thousands of degrees hotter than Betelgeuse, though, making it shine blue-white rather than red. Betelgeuse (pronounced “BEE-tel-joos”) is the name of the most famous star in this famed constellation. Its formal name is “Alpha Orionis,” with the Greek letter alpha given to the brightest star in a given constellation, beta to the second-brightest and so on.

Stargazing Essentials

Below the three bright stars of Orion’s belt lies his sword, where you can find the famous Orion Nebula. The nebula is only 1,300 light-years away, making it the closest large star-forming region to Earth. Because of its brightness and prominent location just below Orion’s belt, you can even spot the Orion Nebula from Earth! But with a pair of binoculars, you can get a much more detailed view of the stellar nursery.

For this reason, Orion’s Belt looks more or less the same as it did millennia ago. The Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33), one of the best-known dark nebulae in the sky, appears just south of Alnitak. The Horsehead is backlit by the emission nebula IC 434 and is part of a large dust cloud catalogued as Lynds 1630 (LND 1630). The celestial equator is the projection of the Earth’s equator into space. The three stars are part of the Orion OB1b subgroup of the Orion OB1 association.