Discover the cosmosEach day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
Explanation:The Dark Doodad Nebula driftsthrough southern skies, a tantalizing target for binoculars toward the small constellation Musca, The Fly.
A dusty interstellar cloud, it’s seen against rich starfields just south of the Coalsack Nebula and the Southern Cross.
Stretching for about 3 degrees across this telescopic field of view, the Dark Doodadis punctuated near its southern tip by yellowish globular star clusterNGC 4372.
Of course NGC 4372 roams the halo of our Milky Waygalaxy, a background object some 20,000 light-years away and only by chance along our line-of-sight to the Dark Doodad.
About 700 light-years distant and over 30 light-years long, the Dark Doodad’s well defined silhouette belongs to thepotentiallystar-forming Musca molecular cloud.
The dusty Dark Doodad’s delightfully alliterative moniker was first coined byastro-imager and writer Dennis di Cicco in 1986 while observing Comet Halley from the Australian outback.
Tomorrow’s picture:pixels in space