From the three stars of Orion's belt dangles his sword. The fuzzy star in the middle of the sword is not really a star at all but the famous Orion Nebula, an object of striking beauty even when seen through a backyard telescope. Its ethereal glow, however, is not the secret of its fascination for professional astronomers. Blots of orange light. They resemble specks of one's lunch dropped accidentally onto the photo.
Many astronomers believe they are.
When astronomers tell us that the Andromeda galaxy is two million light-years away, they are really giving us an educated guess. No one has come up with a way to measure such mind-boggling distances directly. Distances to the very closest stars, those within 200 light-years or so, can be measured directly by stellar parallax, which involves simple trigonometry. But this only works for stars so close to the earth that they appear to move slightly as the earth goes around the sun. Most stars, and all galaxies, are much farther away.