48 Fun Facts About Orion Constellation

How many modern constellations does the IAU recognise, with Orion among them?

88. The International Astronomical Union settled the list at its first assembly, in Rome in 1922, after astronomers' additions had pushed some star atlases past a hundred constellations.

During which season is Orion most prominent in Northern Hemisphere evening skies?

Winter. South of the equator the same stars are a summer sight and the hunter stands on his head, and from May to July he is up only by day and so can't be seen from most of the world.

Which 2nd-century astronomer included Orion among his 48 constellations?

Ptolemy. His star catalogue, written around AD 150, stayed the standard for more than 1,400 years, until Tycho Brahe measured the sky afresh at the end of the 16th century.

Which red supergiant marks Orion's right shoulder?

Betelgeuse. Say it aloud and you have 'Beetlejuice': the star's name gave Tim Burton's 1988 film its title and its ghost his name.

NASA's Orion capsule carried astronauts around the Moon in 2026 in a programme named after which goddess?

Artemis. In one telling she loved the hunter Orion and shot him by mistake when her brother Apollo dared her to hit a speck far out at sea; grieving, she set him among the stars.

What are the stars of Orion's Belt called?

Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka. The row sits almost on the celestial equator, which is why the Belt can be seen from nearly everywhere on Earth at some time of year.

In which 1997 film is a tiny galaxy said to be 'on Orion's belt', meaning the collar of a cat?

Men in Black. A dying alien's clue sends the agents looking to the sky before they realise that Orion is his pet cat, with the galaxy hanging from its collar.

The westernmost star of Orion's Belt lies almost on the celestial equator, so where does it rise?

Due east. Anything on the celestial equator rises due east and sets due west, so this star, lying almost exactly on the line, makes a ready-made compass for finding both.

The dusty discs Hubble found around young stars in the Orion Nebula are the raw material for making what?

Planets. Hubble's first sharp views of the nebula showed discs of dust around at least half the young stars surveyed, a sign that planet-making is common across the galaxy.

In which 1982 film does a dying android recall 'attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion'?

Blade Runner. Rutger Hauer cut the scripted speech down the night before filming and added its famous last line about tears in rain.

Which star forms Orion's head?

Meissa. Much of its fierce output is ultraviolet light the eye can't see, so the star that marks Orion's head looks surprisingly faint.

Which river of Greek myth is the long constellation that winds away from Orion's left foot?

Eridanus. It is the river into which Phaethon plunged, struck down by Zeus after losing control of the Sun's chariot, and it meanders from the hunter's foot deep into the southern sky.

Scholars now trace the name of Orion's Alpha star, the hunter's shoulder, to which Arabic phrase?

The hand of al-Jawzā'. Medieval scribes misread the Arabic 'y' of yad, hand, as a 'b', and later scholars explained the garbled word as 'armpit', a meaning still widely repeated.

If Alpha Orionis replaced the Sun, whose orbits would it engulf at the very least?

Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. At roughly 700 times the Sun's width its surface would lie out past the asteroid belt, and by some estimates beyond Jupiter's orbit too.

When Orion's red shoulder star faded in late 2019, what did many skywatchers suspect was coming?

A supernova. Hubble data point instead to the star having blown out a cloud of hot gas that cooled into dust and hid part of its surface, though the exact cause is not settled.

In Greek myth, which sisters, now a star cluster, does Orion still chase across the night sky?

The Pleiades. Zeus is said to have set the sisters among the stars to save them, yet the hunter still rises behind them every night; one ancient writer says it was their mother he was after.

Twice as hot as the Sun, the star at Orion's left foot shines which colour?

Blue-white. A star's colour follows its heat: the coolest glow red, the Sun at under 6,000 K looks yellowish, and this supergiant, at about 12,000 K, shines blue-white.

Which part of Orion holds a naked-eye 'star' that is really a glowing cloud of gas?

The Sword. Its middle 'star' looks slightly fuzzy to the naked eye because it is the Orion Nebula, a mass of gas from which a swarm of new stars is being born.

In 1880 Orion's nebula became the first ever to be what?

Photographed. Henry Draper needed an exposure of almost an hour, and in 1883 Andrew Common's photographs of the same nebula recorded stars too faint for any eye to see.

What is the young star cluster at the heart of the Orion Nebula called?

The Trapezium. William Herschel named it for the four-sided figure its brightest stars make, and it is their fierce light that sets the whole surrounding nebula glowing.

Which telescope pioneer studied the stars around the Orion Nebula in 1610 and 1617 yet never noted the cloud itself?

Galileo Galilei. He even found the star at its heart to be a multiple, but the first to record the glowing cloud is thought to be the Frenchman Peiresc, late in 1610, and he never published it.

Which dark cloud near the eastern Belt star is named for its distinctive shape?

The Horsehead Nebula. It gives off no glow of its own: the horse is a cloud of thick, cold dust seen in silhouette against the red light of hydrogen gas behind it.

Which astronomer, once her observatory director's housemaid, found a famous dark nebula in Orion in 1888?

Williamina Fleming. Taken on from Edward Pickering's household to help at Harvard's observatory, she spotted the cloud on a photographic plate and went on to classify most of the 10,000 stars in its first great catalogue.

Which body is the parent of the Orionid meteor shower?

Halley's Comet. Earth crosses its trail of dust twice a year, so the same comet that gives us the Orionids each October also brings the Eta Aquariid meteors every May.

Which star do you find by extending the line of Orion's Belt to the southeast?

Sirius. The brightest star in the night sky is the Dog Star, and the sultry 'dog days' of summer take their name from the season when it first rose at dawn just ahead of the Sun.

Which animal, a small constellation of its own, crouches beneath Orion's feet while his dogs give chase?

A hare. Lepus sits right under the hunter, and the Greek poet Aratus pictured the Great Dog chasing it across the sky for ever, rising and setting close behind.

Star maps show Orion raising his club and shield against which neighbouring constellation to his northwest?

Taurus. Old star atlases draw the Bull charging the hunter, though the familiar myths of Orion describe no such fight; Hyginus notes only that some made a bull his prey.

Which star marks Orion's left shoulder?

Bellatrix. Its Latin name means 'female warrior', and it lent that name to Bellatrix Lestrange, the Harry Potter villain, many of whose relatives are also named after stars.

In which ancient epic does the hero meet Orion's ghost, still herding wild beasts with a bronze club?

The Odyssey. Odysseus sees the giant hunter among the dead, and earlier in the poem Orion is among the stars he watches as he steers his raft away from Calypso's island.

In Hesiod's account, which god fathered the giant hunter Orion with Euryale, a daughter of King Minos?

Poseidon. The sea god gave his son the power to walk on water; a rival tale from Boeotia has Orion born from an ox-hide that visiting gods buried in the earth.

In the best-known myth, which creature did Gaia send to kill Orion, so that their constellations never share the sky?

A scorpion. Orion had bragged that he could kill every beast on Earth, and the two were set on opposite sides of the sky, so that the hunter slips below the horizon as the Scorpion rises.

Blinded on Chios, Orion regained his sight by facing what?

The rising sun. In the usual telling King Oenopion had put out his eyes for assaulting his daughter Merope, and the giant walked towards the dawn until its first rays healed them.

Which god lent the blinded Orion his servant Cedalion, who rode on the giant's shoulders as a guide?

Hephaestus. The blinded hunter is said to have found the smith god's forge on the island of Lemnos by following the sound of hammering.

The ancient Egyptians came to identify the stars of Orion with which god of the dead?

Osiris. They first called Orion's star-god Sah; he rises just ahead of the sky's brightest star, whose goddess Sopdet was his partner, and the pair merged with Osiris and Isis.

What did the Babylonians call Orion?

The True Shepherd of Anu. Anu was the Babylonians' god of the sky, and some of the star figures in their lists passed to the Greeks and are still on our maps.

The line 'Can you loosen Orion's belt' comes from which book of the Bible?

Job. God puts the question to him as one of a string of wonders no human can command, and the Hebrew word used for the constellation, Kesil, is the same as the word for 'fool'.

What does the Chinese name for Orion, Shen, literally mean?

Three. The name first covered only the three Belt stars and later grew to take in the whole figure, which the Chinese, unusually, pictured much as the Greeks did: a great hunter or warrior.

By what name are the stars of Orion's Belt known in Spain and much of South America?

Las Tres Marías, the Marys of the Gospels. Where Spaniards see holy women, Puerto Ricans see men in the same stars: Los Tres Reyes Magos, the Wise Men.

To the Lakota, Orion's Belt is the spine of which animal?

A bison. Where the Greeks drew a hunter, the Lakota drew the hunted: the Belt is the animal's backbone and the great rectangle of bright stars around it is its ribs.

In Australia, Orion's Belt and Sword are sometimes called which kitchen item?

A saucepan. From the Southern Hemisphere the hunter appears upside down, so the Belt and Sword stop looking like either: Australians and New Zealanders sometimes call them the Saucepan or the Pot.

The Army division that wore Orion on its shoulder patch under a General O'Ryan came from which state?

New York. The 27th was the state's National Guard division, and its patch honoured its commander with a play on his name: the stars of Orion for O'Ryan, with the letters NYD among them.

Which star, the brightest in Orion, do Māori call Puanga and watch for at dawn to mark their new year?

Rigel. As Puanga it rises before dawn just ahead of the Matariki cluster, and some iwi take its return, not Matariki's, as the start of the year.

Orion Pictures, the studio with the constellation logo, released which 1984 science-fiction hit but none of its sequels?

The Terminator. The studio named after the hunter's stars put out James Cameron's original, then watched five sequels go to other companies, the first of them to TriStar.

Until Eugène Delporte's 1930 atlas, what did Orion and the other constellations officially lack?

Fixed boundaries. Delporte ruled them along the sky's own lines of latitude and longitude, ending the old practice of shared stars, so every point in the sky now belongs to exactly one constellation.

Ancient Greek and Roman sailors linked the autumn rising and setting of Orion with the coming of what?

Stormy weather. Orion's return to the night sky in November marked the end of the sailing season, and Roman poets gave the hunter epithets such as nimbosus, 'the stormy'.

Which orange giant star do you reach by extending the line of Orion's Belt to the northwest?

Aldebaran. Its name is Arabic for 'the follower', because it trails a famous star cluster across the sky night after night, with the hunter's Belt pointing after them both.

Precolonial Filipinos called Orion's Belt 'balatik' after what kind of device?

A self-firing arrow trap. Hunters set the balatik in the bush for wild pigs, and the old star name lives on: a traditional sailing boat launched in the Philippines in 2014 was christened Balatik.

Orion sits on the celestial equator today, but which slow motion of Earth's axis is gradually carrying it south?

Precession. Earth's axis traces a slow circle roughly every 26,000 years, shifting every constellation's place in the sky, so the hunter's seat on the celestial equator is only temporary.