Starry Starry Night

Orion hangs inverted in our evening sky at the moment. The three bright stars of his belt (or the bottom of the pot if you're from this side of the world) form one of the easiest asterisms to spot in the sky.

Just above the belt stars is Orion's sword -the middle one looks a bit fuzzy in this blip, but that's because it's not actually a star. Its a giant stellar nursery called the Great Orion Nebula where dozens of stars are being born even as you read this.

The bright object near the tree is the planet Jupiter, and the small group of stars just down and left from it is an open cluster of young hot blue stars called The Pleiades (pronounced PLEE-a-DEES)

This blip is actually made by combining 40 ten-second exposures plus another 20 1/8000 second exposures. When these were all lined up and stacked, the image was then brought into Photoshop for a little tweaking of colour, sharpness, and a final crop.