Rigel

Let's stick with Orion a bit longer.   The star Rigel is usually the brightest in Orion (even though it is sometimes called β Ori). In fact Rigel is further from us that Betelgeuse, and it is indeed the brightest star within 1,000 light years of Earth. Rigel like Betelgeuse is a supergiant star, but it is blue rather than red. Rigel intersects my work because it too has been detected as a radio source, so it gives us an idea of which blue stars will be visible with the Square Kilometer Array. It turns out for various reasons that although Rigel and Betelgeuse are inherently much brighter, the stars like Arcturus are much better prospects for the Square Kilometer Array. Giant stars like Arcturus are much more common than supergiants, so the SKA should see lots of them even in the bulge of our Galaxy. The Wotjobaluk koori of southeastern Australia held that Rigel was the mother-in-law of Altair which explained why there are rarely seen in the sky together.