C-beams off the shoulder of Orion

Orion is a morning constellation right now, high in the sky if you get up early enough. The three stars making the belt are obvious enough, and just below it hangs his dagger*. The middle star in the dagger is not a star, but a star-making gas cloud of mind-numbing size. There is much to see in the vast sprawl of its 5000 cubic light year volume, including young stars, still going through the pangs of birth. One of these is the strange object called Herbig-Haro 502: a newly-born star shooting twin jets of material, far, far out into the nebula itself. Its beauty is simply breathtaking, as you can see in this spectacular image from Hubble: