How many stars make up Orion's Belt?

Orion’s Belt is made up of three prominent stars: Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka. They appear as a nearly straight, evenly spaced line across the middle of the constellation Orion, making the pattern one of the easiest features to recognize in the night sky.

The three stars are extremely luminous blue or blue-white stars and are much larger and hotter than the Sun. Their apparent closeness is a line-of-sight effect: they are not all at exactly the same distance from Earth. The belt spans roughly 2.3 degrees of the sky.

A subtle astronomy distinction can cause confusion. Alnitak is itself a triple-star system, while Mintaka is a sextuple system, so the belt contains more than three physical stars in total. In ordinary skywatching and in the traditional asterism, however, “Orion’s Belt” means the three visible star systems. The three are also known by names such as the Three Kings and the Three Sisters.