I keep seeing people call the Orion Nebula a galaxy in photo comments and it drives me nuts | Astronomy Photos - Freelance Forum - The Community for Independent Professionals

Guess they skipped the day in school where they covered the difference between a cloud and a whole city of stars. Next they'll be calling the sun a planet.

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rowan_ross3mo ago

Is it possible that part of the confusion comes from how we name things in space? The Orion Nebula is literally cataloged as M42, but "Orion" is also the name of the constellation, and people already mix up constellations with galaxies all the time. Add in how telescopes show a nebula as this massive, detailed object, and it's easy to see why someone might assume it's way farther away than it really is. On top of that, the word "galaxy" sounds cooler and more important than "nebula" to the average person. So they just go with the more impressive term without thinking about what it actually means. Honestly, I blame marketing and clickbait headlines more than anything else.

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kelly4705mo ago

Saw a video last week where someone called it the "Orion Galaxy". It's a NEBULA, a big cloud of gas where stars are born, inside our OWN Milky Way. A galaxy is a whole system of billions of stars. The mix-up is so common it's wild. Feels like basic space facts are just getting lost sometimes.

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faithpatel5mo ago

Honestly that mix-up drives me nuts too.

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