The Orion Nebula
The one stop you fly into: a cloud lit from inside by four young stars.
1,344 light-yearsThe late show, under the dome
Lights down.
A late show for people who stay up. Lie back in the dome. The house lights go down, and the sky takes you out past the Moon and Saturn, into the Orion Nebula, and on to Andromeda before it brings you back to your seat.
Start the showThe Moon first, close enough that it stops being a disc.
Three hundred and eighty-four thousand kilometres from your seat. The light that shows you the craters left the Moon a little over a second ago. It is the only stop tonight you could drive to, given a road and four months.
- Distance
- 384,400 km
- Light age
- 1.3 seconds
- Across
- 3,474 km
Saturn, and the rings you have seen in books.
About 1.4 billion kilometres out. The light you see here left Saturn 78 minutes ago, around the time you were deciding whether to stay up. The rings are mostly water ice, grains to boulders, and edge to edge they would reach three quarters of the way from the Earth to the Moon.
- Distance
- 1.4 billion km
- Light age
- 78 minutes
- Rings across
- 282,000 km
The Orion Nebula, where stars are still being made.
Thirteen hundred light-years out, and you fly into it. This is the glow under Orion's belt: a cloud of hydrogen lit from inside by four young stars, with new ones still forming in the dark lanes. The light reaching the dome tonight set out in the seventh century.
- Distance
- 1,344 light-years
- Light age
- 1,344 years
- Across
- 24 light-years
Andromeda. This light left before there were people.
The nearest big galaxy, a trillion stars, and the farthest thing you can see with your own eyes from a dark field. Its light took two and a half million years to reach the dome. It is also coming closer, and in about four billion years it will arrive.
- Distance
- 2.5 million light-years
- Light age
- 2.5 million years
- Stars
- 1 trillion