Orion Nebula

[selden]

The part of the Orion nebula that we can see is shaped somewhat like a bowl. The brightest central part is the "bottom" of the bowl. It's farther away from us than the darker regions around it.

Think of it as something like a baloon that is in the process of bursting after being blown up too far. The gases and dust clouds are being pushed away from the center by the radiation from the hot stars that formed there: the Triangulum. The brightest regions of the gas are surfaces that face toward the central stars. The black regions are dust clouds that are between us and the inside of the bowl, blocking our view of it.

You might take a look at
http://vis.sdsc.edu/research/orion.html
It shows the shape that was deduced from the amount of reflected and reradiated light and infrared coming from the nebula.

Their upper picture is looking into the bowl of the nebula from a viewpoint that's near the right side of the left picture in the second row.

[buggs_moran]

Does somebody have an idea on the structure of this nebula seen on the side view (if i can say there is a side ) ?

Thanks
jll

You could use some info from the movie I posted earlier http://vis.sdsc.edu/research/orion.html but most of what we could come up with for a sideways glance would be conjecture. You might not see much of anything from a side view. The gas and dust might obscure much of what we would see. It's too bad we couldn't create nebulae in Celestia that would reflect, obscure or emit based on composition and distance from stars around them. It would be cool to "paint" nebula (similar to Fridger & Toti's pts files) that would react to their surroundings. I think that you could guess depths of the clouds based on what we see, or rather don't see. The obscurity of background stars in photos gives a feel for the thickness. I would imagine the Orion 'cave" would be quite a bit like the Horsehead nebula, which is shown well as a whole nebula here --> http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap051013.html. If you look at the area at the left of the picture you can get a feel for the fact that there is a "cave" behind the horsehead. So, I think that it is similar to the Trapezium area, but from the side. There is a larger problem though. The whole complex around Orion is immense. (warning, big photo)http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0504/bigorion_wang_big.jpgDoing the area justice would be impossible at this time in Celestia. Of course, our eyes wouldn't pick up much of the surroundings, and Celestia is supposed to be mostly in visible light, so maybe our concentration on the more luminous areas is fine.