Real astronomy and history of the stars, with sources. Star stories from named traditions. Star symbolism · symbolic, not predictive.

Science & history · Constellation guide

Orion, the hunter

Orion is one of the few star patterns almost anyone can pick out: a bright hourglass with three stars in a row across its middle. Red Betelgeuse marks his shoulder, blue-white Rigel his foot.

Where is it from where I am?

Where Orion is among the stars NASA's star map around Orion, about 34 degrees across, north up and east to the left, with this site's chart lines and labels over it. Labelled: Betelgeuse, Rigel, Bellatrix, Alnitak, Mintaka, Alnilam. BetelgeuseRigelBellatrixAlnitakMintakaAlnilam NE

Show in my sky

North is up and east is to the left, the way the sky looks from underneath. The pattern turns through the night, so match it by shape, not angle. Lines are this site's own drawing, a convention: the IAU defines constellations as areas of sky with official boundaries, not as stick figures. The sky map draws the fuller IAU figures. Sky image: NASA/GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio, Deep Star Maps 2020.
About this picture

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio. Gaia DR2: ESA/Gaia/DPAC. Constellation figures based on those developed for the IAU by Alan MacRobert of Sky and Telescope magazine (Roger Sinnott and Rick Fienberg). NASA's page (opens in a new tab).

The map is a composite of 1.7 billion catalogued stars, not a photograph from one place: it shows stars far too faint for the eye, and no weather, Moon or city light. It is drawn here in this chart's projection, with each star where it was in 2000; the fastest-moving bright star has shifted about a minute of arc since, far less than a pixel here.

How to spot it: Three bright stars in a short straight row: Orion's belt. Source (opens in a new tab)

What you are looking at

Two bright shoulders, two bright feet and a belt of three: the hunter of Greek myth, drawn on an area of sky.

NASA's description (opens in a new tab): three bright stars close together in an almost straight line make the belt, two brighter stars to the north mark the shoulders and two more to the south the feet. Betelgeuse is the right shoulder and Rigel the left foot; Ian Ridpath (opens in a new tab) calls Orion the most splendid of constellations.

For all its fame it is only the 26th largest (opens in a new tab) of the 88. The International Astronomical Union (opens in a new tab) defines it as an area of sky inside a boundary, not as a figure: the lines drawn between its stars, including on this page's chart, are a convention, and other cultures join the same stars differently.

Sources for this section NASA Science, Discovering the Universe Through the Constellation Orion (opens in a new tab); Ian Ridpath, Star Tales: Orion (opens in a new tab); International Astronomical Union, The Constellations (opens in a new tab)

Not as flat as it looks

The belt stars look like a matched set, but they lie hundreds of light-years apart.

NASA gives the belt's distances (opens in a new tab) as about 800 light-years for Alnitak, about 1,300 for Alnilam and about 900 for Mintaka, yet from Earth the three look equally bright. Seen from elsewhere in the Galaxy they would make a different pattern, or none.

Some points are more than one star. Mintaka (opens in a new tab), at the belt's end, is a system of five stars.

The figure is also changing, slowly. Every star has its own motion across the sky; ESA explains (opens in a new tab) that over millennia these motions reshape the constellations, though not noticeably within a lifetime.

Sources for this section NASA Science, Discovering the Universe Through the Constellation Orion (opens in a new tab); ESA, How does Gaia study the Milky Way? (opens in a new tab)

How to find it

Look for the belt. When Orion is up depends on the month and the hour, not only the season.

Orion lies across the celestial equator, so it can be seen from around the world (opens in a new tab). By this site's calculation (opens in a new tab), its middle stands about 49° up in the south at its highest from 40°N and about 56° up in the north from 35°S, and it is highest at about 9 p.m. local time in mid-January.

In northern winter it is an evening sight: the NASA Night Sky Network (opens in a new tab) finds it rising in the east in early January evenings, after the Pleiades and Hyades, and NASA's December guide (opens in a new tab) has it rising in the east as evening falls.

It is not up at the same hour all year. NASA Space Place (opens in a new tab) explains that as Earth orbits the Sun, the stars rise a little earlier each night, so a constellation drifts westward from one evening to the next and for part of the year is in the daytime sky.

How to see it Once you have the belt, follow it one way to Sirius and the other way to the orange star Aldebaran and the Pleiades; the Night Sky Network (opens in a new tab) uses the belt to find both clusters in Taurus.

Sources for this section NASA Science, Discovering the Universe Through the Constellation Orion (opens in a new tab); Bright Star Catalogue, 5th Revised Ed. (Hoffleit & Warren 1991), as computed by this site's star engine (opens in a new tab); Kat Troche (Astronomical Society of the Pacific), Spot the Young Stars of the Hyades and Pleiades, NASA Night Sky Network (2023) (opens in a new tab); NASA Science, What's Up: December 2024 (opens in a new tab); NASA Space Place, What Are Constellations? (updated 2022) (opens in a new tab)

What you can actually see

Two coloured stars, the belt and a fuzzy patch in the sword: much less colour than a photograph.

The colours are real and visible. Rigel's surface is thousands of degrees hotter than Betelgeuse's, which is why one looks blue-white and the other red (opens in a new tab), even from Earth.

Below the belt hangs the sword, and its middle “star” is not a star. It is the Orion Nebula, M42 (opens in a new tab), a cloud of gas and dust where stars are forming, visible to the naked eye under moderately dark skies. Binoculars or a small telescope show more, including the Trapezium, four young stars in a keystone shape at its heart.

How far is it? One NASA page (opens in a new tab) says about 1,300 light-years and calls it the closest large star-forming region to Earth; the Night Sky Network (opens in a new tab) and NASA's Messier catalogue page (opens in a new tab) say 1,500. The figures come from different measurements.

How to see it Orion doubles as a test of your sky. The Night Sky Network (opens in a new tab) suggests comparing its stars with a printable Dark Sky Wheel when it is high and well after sunset, after letting your eyes adapt for twenty minutes; the faintest stars you can see give your sky's limiting magnitude.

Keep in mind Photographs show far more detail and colour than the eye can (opens in a new tab). By eye, the nebula is a soft grey glow, and that is a good sighting.

Sources for this section NASA Science, Discovering the Universe Through the Constellation Orion (opens in a new tab); Kat Troche (Astronomical Society of the Pacific), A Flame in the Sky – the Orion Nebula, NASA Night Sky Network (2023) (opens in a new tab); NASA Hubble, Messier 42 (the Orion Nebula) (opens in a new tab); Kat Troche (Astronomical Society of the Pacific), Check Your Sky Quality with Orion!, NASA Night Sky Network (2023) (opens in a new tab); Kat Troche (Astronomical Society of the Pacific), The Great Rift, NASA Night Sky Network (2025) (opens in a new tab)

An ancient pattern

Orion is among the oldest named star groups on record.

Orion is among the few star groups known to Homer and Hesiod (opens in a new tab), the earliest Greek writers. Ridpath traces the pattern further back, to the Sumerians, whose name for it, URU AN-NA, meant “light of heaven”, and who saw their hero Gilgamesh in it, facing the Bull of Heaven.

The Greek tale of Orion and the scorpion, and how other peoples have read these stars, belong to Historical beliefs; this page sticks to what the stars are. NASA's Night Sky Network (opens in a new tab) notes that Orion's stars have many names across cultures, especially the belt.

Sources for this section Ian Ridpath, Star Tales: Orion (opens in a new tab); Kat Troche (Astronomical Society of the Pacific), A Flame in the Sky – the Orion Nebula, NASA Night Sky Network (2023) (opens in a new tab)

Where on Earth, and when

The whole key pattern rises from anywhere between about 83°S and 80°N.

Its middle climbs at least 20° high, the finder's threshold for a suggestion, from latitudes between 71°S and 69°N.

It is highest in the evening sky, at about 9 p.m. local time, in mid-January, from either hemisphere, wherever it rises. With daylight saving time, that is nearer 10 p.m. on the clock.

Worked out by this site from the Bright Star Catalogue, for a flat, clear horizon. Hills, buildings, haze and city light all cut into this; the air also lifts objects near the horizon by about half a degree. For your own place and night, use the sky finder.

Sources

All constellations and asterisms →

Settings

Your location

Only used to work out rise and set times. It stays in this browser.

Moon orientation

Southern-hemisphere skies show the moon flipped. This follows your location automatically.

Saved facts

Everything saved here

This site keeps your location, your saved facts and your settings in this browser and nowhere else. Nothing is uploaded, and nothing here can be recovered once it is gone.

Cool Moon Facts · built by Whiptronics LLC

Gear that makes it better

Where these numbers come from