Orion’s Belt is a prominent asterism formed by three stars in the constellation Orion. The three bright blue stars – Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka – outline the belt in the constellation figure of the celestial Hunter. Appearing as three stars in a row, Orion’s Belt stars lie more than 1,000 light-years away and are among the brightest stars in the sky.Orion’s Belt is one of the most familiar asterisms in the night sky, along with the Big Dipper in the northern sky and the Southern Cross in the southern. The asterism is easy to find because is part of one of the most prominent stellar patterns in the northern sky, the hourglass-shaped constellation figure of Orion. The asterism and the constellation dominate the evening sky from November to February.The Flame Nebula, designated as NGC 2024 and Sh2-277, is an emission nebula in the constellation Orion. It is about 1350 light-years away. At that distance, the Flame Nebula lies within the Orion B cloud of the larger Orion Molecular Cloud Complex.The bright star Alnitak (ζ Ori), the easternmost star in the Belt of Orion, appears very close to the Flame Nebula in the sky. But the star and nebula are not physically associated with one another. The Flame Nebula contains a young cluster of stars which includes at least one hot, luminous O-type star labeled IRS 2b. The dense gas and dust in the foreground of the nebula heavily obscures the star cluster inside the nebula, making studies at infrared wavelengths most useful.The energetic ultraviolet light emitted by the central O-type star IRS 2b into the Flame Nebula causes the gas to be excited and heated. The glow of the nebula results from the energy input from this central star. Within the nebula and surrounding the central hot star is a cluster of young, lower-mass stars,86% of which have circumstellar disks.X-ray observations by the Chandra X-ray Observatory show several hundred young stars, out of an estimated population of 800 stars.X-ray and infrared images indicate that the young stars are concentrated near the center of the cluster.


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LDN 1614    05 35 32.98-00 38 07.8204.61-17.120.00414.45


NGC 2024  Flame nebula   and O-type star IRS 2b