Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Orion Nebula/archive1

Orion Nebula

This recent SCOTW has shaped up pretty nicely. It has undergone considerable expansion and improvement in the past few months, and I think it's ready for a FA review. Please let me know what you think and I'll try to address any concerns. Thank you. — RJH 14:34, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

• Support. The article has become vastly better since I requested its expansion. It is balanced, has illustrative pictures and its sources are okay.--Jyril 16:01, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
• Comment the weasel words have to be removed or cited (see WP:AWT). Some examples:
  • The Orion Nebula is considered to be one of the most scrutinized and photographed objects in the night sky
    • I added a citation to a source that has comparable wording. Hopefully that's sufficient. In reality virtually every site on the Orion Nebula says something along these lines. — RJH 22:36, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
  • The Orion Nebula is considered to be a primary example of a stellar .
    • Reworded slightly.
• Additionally, I usually don't see terms in bold, and I'm not too sure if this is commonly done. Thanks, AndyZ _t 21:15, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
  • Bold removed. Thanks.
• Object at the moment. I'm really sorry I wasn't able to get involved when this was a collaboration effort, or in its peer review - ionised nebulae are my area of expertise. The article is looking far better than it did a few short weeks ago, but I don't think it's quite comprehensive yet. Among the things I think are missing are:

1. little discussion of abundances and temperatures in the nebula. It's a long standing puzzle that two different ways of measuring the abundances give quite different results. This is mention in H II region, and the Orion Nebula is the best-studied case.
2. No mention of X-ray observations - Chandra showed that a lot of stars in the nebula are strong X-ray emitters.
3. A mention is made of how Trumpler's distance estimate was close to the modern value, but there's no discussion of the ways in which the modern value has been derived.
4. I think more discussion of proplyds would be useful, a bit more about their properties (mass, size) and a citation about how they vary with distance from the Trapezium.
5. For an intergalactic context it could be worth mentioning that although Orion is the most intense star-forming region known in our galaxy, if the Tarantula Nebula was where Orion is it would fill the constellation of Orion and be about as bright as the full moon.
6. You could mention the speculation that the inclusion of such a bright and obviously non-cometary object in Messiers list was the result of rivalry with Lacaille [1]
7. Also definitely worth mentioning is the strange fact that it apparently wasn't noticed by any pre-telescopic observers, which led to some suggestions it had only become bright enough to be visible at about the time telescopes were invented.

I am also a little bit concerned about the quality of some of the references. For example, I don't think an Astronomy Picture of the Day is a good reference to cite for the size of the nebula, and I'm confused as to the meaning of footnote 3, which gives a different value to the value APOD used anyway. You also might want to use a reference more recent than Balick (1974) for some of the info you've got from him.

I removed the APoD reference since the diameter of the nebulae is already covered in the table data (based on distance and angular diameter). Were there other specific references that were of concern? Most of them appear pretty legit. publications, AFAIK. — RJH

I mentioned to RJH that I had put together some content offline a long while ago - I'll add what I can from that to the article shortly. Worldtraveller 10:00, 26 April 2006 (UTC)