Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/308

294 nebula. These four stars are collectively named the Trapezium, The brightest is of the sixth magnitude, the others are of the seventh, seven and a half, and eighth magnitudes respectively. The radiant mist about them has a faint greenish tinge, while the four stars, together with three others at no great distance, which follow a fold of the nebula like a row of buttons on a coat, always appear to me to show an extraordinary liveliness of radiance, as if the strange haze served to set them off.

Our three-inch would have shown the four stars of the Trapezium perfectly well, and the four-inch would have revealed a fifth star, very faint, outside a line joining the smallest of the four and its nearest neighbor. But the five-inch goes a step farther and enables us, with steady gazing, to see even a sixth star, of only the twelfth magnitude, just outside the Trapezium,

Before quitting the Orion nebula do not fail to notice an eighth magnitude star, a short distance northeast of the Great Nebula, and nearly opposite the broad opening in the latter that leads in toward the gap occupied by the Trapezium. This star is plainly enveloped in nebulosity, that is unquestionably connected with the larger mass of which it appears to form a satellite.