The Orion Spur view shows the Sun’s stretch of its spiral arm, where the bright stars of our sky, nearby clusters and star-forming clouds share one band.
About The Orion Spur
At this scale the Local Bubble is a small hollow and the bright stars of the constellations crowd around the Sun. Farther out appear the great star-forming regions of the Local Arm: the Orion complex, with the Orion Nebula at its heart, the clouds of Cygnus, and the open clusters scattered along the band.
Distances measured by the Gaia spacecraft have revealed that many nearby clouds lie on a long, gently undulating chain, named the Radcliffe Wave, rather than on the tilted ring once called the Gould Belt. The Orion complex is part of it.
What you see in the piece
Here the constellations come apart: their stars lie at very different distances, so the figures we see from Earth dissolve into a scattered field as soon as you leave the Sun.
Measured or modelled
The arm itself is the galaxy model’s density field; the clouds and clusters on it are catalogue objects at their measured distances.
Questions
Where is the Sun in the Orion Spur?
Inside it, in the Local Bubble, between the Sagittarius–Carina Arm towards the centre and the Perseus Arm outward.
What is in the Orion Spur?
The Orion Nebula and the rest of the Orion complex, the Cygnus star-forming clouds, many open clusters and nearly every star you can see with the naked eye.