14 DAY TRIAL // Humans have been gazing at Orion for millennia, but they've never seen it as beautiful as this. Granted, we can't actually see it like the photo above would suggest, as the fiery glow is only visible to telescopes tuned to submillimeter radio frequencies.
Luckily, the European Southern Observatory has just such a telescope, the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) in Chile.
It can see much more than the stars, it can pick up the faint glow of the actually rather cold dust and gas that surrounds much of area of the sky we call the constellation of Orion.
"A rich melting pot of bright nebulae, hot young stars and cold dust clouds, this region is hundreds of light-years across and located about 1350 light-years from us," ESO explained.
"The submillimetre-wavelength glow arising from the cold dust clouds is seen in orange in this image and is overlaid on a view of the region taken in the more familiar visible light," it added.
While astronomers actually have a lot to learn from studying the gas clouds at submillimeter wavelengths, most people would agree that the effort is worth it just for the spectacular image.