Before I even learned how to identify the Big Dipper, my mother taught me to recognize Orion's Belt. The most prominent and brightest constellation in the winter sky, this beloved grouping of stars has planted the seeds for more than one astronomy career. "It's just hard not to notice," says Salman Hameed, Ph.D., assistant professor of integrated science and humanities at Hampshire College.

Thousands of years ago, our ancestors also gazed at this stellar arrangement above them and saw patterns that inspired intricate stories about the gods. Though different cultures wove different myths, the Greeks' tales hinged around Orion, the Hunter. A giant with a lion's skin in one hand and a raised club in the other, Orion also wore a famous belt that stretches between three brilliant stars.

In one tale, Orion's lover Artemis is tricked by her brother into shooting him. When she realizes what she's done, her heart breaks. She honors Orion by placing him in the most prominent place in the sky, forever. In another, a scorpion is sent to kill the hunter — and succeeds. That's why we never see Scorpio and Orion in the sky at the same time.

Hameed says most people today see the stars' arrangements as random and the stories as a way humans have tried to make sense of that randomness. For the ancients, however, the stories told how the gods very carefully placed the stars just where they belonged.

Once telescopes came on the scene, scientists learned there was much more to Orion. The Orion Nebula, says Hameed, is one of the most amazing "deep-sky" objects, those that can be faintly seen without a telescope. On very dark nights, Hameed says that a fuzzy patch is visible on Orion's sword, just below his belt. The haze is actually the glowing hydrogen gas resulting from the birth of a few thousand stars — it appears reddish-greenish in a long-exposure photograph.

Indeed, at 1,300 light years away, this nebula is the closest "stellar nursery" to Earth, a place where astronomers can learn how new stars are born. Mind you, some of the baby stars are millions of years old.

So could all these new stars on the scene skew the familiar outline of Orion?

Well, explains Hameed, on the left shoulder of Orion sits the brilliant red star Betelgeuse (a.k.a. Beetlejuice). This star, bigger than the sun, is near the end of its days and will eventually die in a supernova explosion. As it is 600 light years away, that could have happened already. When we see the expiration, the star will get very bright and then, perhaps, simply disappear. This might occur tomorrow — or a thousand years from now — but don't worry, says Hameed. "There's no danger at all of Orion looking any different in our lifetime."