The Orion Nebula, M42, NGC 1976. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 36. $825.00 framed.

The first time I looked through a good telescope, I aimed it at the Orion Nebula, about 1,600 light-years away, visible to the naked eye as a fuzzy patch in Orion's sword. The bright cluster in the middle is called the Trapezium, and the average age of its approximately 1,000 stars is about 1 million years - very young in astronomical terms. Active, recent and on-going star formation is happening in the Trapezium. I was visually and viscerally struck by the impression that it didn't have just height and width: it had an apparent cloudy depth. I knew this intellectually, but on that night I actually experienced it in the eyepiece. After a lifetime spent under what to the unaided eye seems a two-dimensional sky, stretched overhead like the domed walls of a thin curving tent, seeing this nebula made me feel as if what I would never have consciously called "the top of the sky" had just come off - and I had fallen up into it.