Clouds of Orion

Clouds teem with gas and dust in this close-up of the Orion Nebula.

Astronomers combined observations taken by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) with those by ground-based observatories to build a comprehensive view of the Orion Nebula.

This image is just part of a 520-piece mosaic of photographs obtained between 2004 and 2005 in five colors. The larger mosaic covers a patch of sky about equivalent to that of the full Moon. The pillars of dark dust reaching down from the top of this view are resisting erosion from the intense ultraviolet light cast off by the nebula’s largest stars, astronomers said.