Under a clear, crisp winter sky, there are many objects that can be enjoyed with your unaided eye or binoculars or a small telescope. With so many targets to choose from, I've compiled what I consider the Top 10 deep space objects to see in the evening hours during late February and early March.

You can find everything on the list as soon as evening twilight has ended and complete darkness sets in, about 90 minutes after sunset.

Putting together a list of the best is, of course, very subjective. This one excludes the Moon and planets and focuses on targets at the fringe of visibility. From your own nights of skywatching you may try compiling your own list and see if we agree on anything.

#1: THE GREAT ORION NEBULA

Orion, the mighty Hunter is now high toward the south by nightfall. Below Orions famous three-star belt is undoubtedly one of the most wonderfully beautiful objects in the sky: Messier 42, the Great Orion Nebula.

The nebula appears to surround the middle star of a fainter trio of stars in a line that marks the hunters sword. Its invisible to the unaided eye, though the star itself appears a bit fuzzy. It is resolved in good binoculars and small telescopes as a bright gray-green mist enveloping the star.

In larger telescopes the nebula appears as a great glowing irregular, translucent fan-shaped cloud. A sort of auroral glow is induced in this nebula by fluorescence from the strong ultraviolet radiation of four hot stars entangled within it.

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Edward Emerson Barnard (1857-1923), for many years an astronomer at Yerkes Observatory, once remarked that the nebula reminded him of a great ghostly bat and that he always experienced a feeling of surprise when he saw it. William T. Olcott called it a "A glorious and wonderful sight words fail utterly to describe its beauty."

The Great Orion Nebula is a vast cloud of extremely tenuous glowing gas and dust, approximately 1,600 light-years away and about 30 light-years across (or more than 20,000 times the diameter of the entire solar system). Astrophysicists now believe that this nebulous stuff is a stellar incubator, the primeval chaos from which star formation is presently underway.

Certainly, all you need do is take one look through a good telescope and you will see for yourself why this interstellar nursery is our choice as the number one sky object to look for on a clear, dark winters night.

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