APOD: Spitzer's Orion.

It is the Orion Nebula, or M42, and can be seen with the naked eye as the middle "star" of Orion's sword in the Orion constellation. The nebula is about 1500 light years away with a dimension of 85x60 arc min, and is the brightest diffuse nebula with a brightness of a 4th magnitude star. There is approximately 2300 young stars and 200 stellar embryos in the nebula. The photo is an infrared shot of the nebula taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope.