Winter skies contain some of the most incredible cosmic objects you can see with the naked eye.

In the early evening of any night in mid- to late January, face southeast where you will see winter's most famous constellation, Orion the Hunter. Three evenly spaced stars in a row mark his belt and above them two brilliant stars mark his shoulders and below two more mark his knees. I'd like to zero in on one of Orion's dimmer "stars" because as magnificent as Orion's bright stars are, it is one of his dimmer stars that is one of the most awesome wonders of our universe.

To find it, simply look below his three belt stars for three more evenly spaced much, much dimmer stars, which make up his sword. And then if you look carefully at these three stars, you will notice that no matter how sharp your eyesight, the middle "star" always seems to look fuzzy and slightly out of focus.

That's because this so-called middle star is not a star at all but something we call a nebula, which is a great cosmic cloud of gas and dust out of which brand new stars have been and are still being born.

In fact this nebula, the Orion Nebula, is a stellar womb, a place where new stars are being created. And you can see this great cloud and some of the newborn stars embedded in it with even the cheapest pair of binoculars.

Even better, with a small telescope you'll be able to see the four recently born stars that illuminate this vast cloud. They are arranged in the shape of a baseball diamond and are called the Trapezium.

Although the Orion Nebula looks tiny to the naked eye, in reality its size is mind boggling because there is enough material in it to produce over 10,000 stars the size of our Sun.

It is so huge it would take 20,000 of our solar systems lined up end to end to reach from one edge to the other.

To put it another way, if the distance from our Earth to the Sun were one inch, the distance across the Orion Nebula would be 12 miles. Is that mind boggling or what?

So get thee outside to see the wonderful fuzzy middle "star" in the sword of Orion and experience some of the awe and wonder of winter's brilliant night skies.

Jack Horkheimer is executive director of the Miami Museum of Science. This is the script for his weekly television show co-produced by the museum and WPBT Channel 2 in Miami. It is seen on public television stations around the world. For more information about stars, visit www.jackstargazer.com.