The delightful Dark Doodad Nebula drifts through southern skies, a tantalizing target for binoculars in the constellation Musca, The Fly. The dusty cosmic cloud is seen against rich starfields just south of the prominent Coalsack Nebula and the Southern Cross.
Stretching for about 3 degrees across this scene the Dark Doodad is punctuated at its southern tip (lower left) by globular star cluster NGC 4372. Of course NGC 4372 roams the halo of our Milky Way Galaxy, a background object some 20,000 light-years away and only by chance along our line-of-sight to the Dark Doodad.
The Dark Doodad's well defined silhouette belongs to the Musca molecular cloud, but its better known alliterative moniker was first coined by astro-imager and writer Dennis di Cicco in 1986 while observing Comet Halley from the Australian outback. The Dark Doodad is around 700 light-years distant and over 30 light-years long.
Image & info via APOD
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Thanks for teaching me something today! ;)
#space #nasa #nebula #darkdoodad
Wow... and right next to that doohickey, smiley lookin' thing-a-ma-jig! :)
ReplyDeleteAs always, a nice post, Corina. Enjoy your day.
ReplyDeleteen.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God%27s_Eye
ReplyDeleteThe Second Empire of Man rules two hundred worlds. New Caledonia is the capital of the Trans-Coalsack sector, located on the opposite side of the Coalsack Nebula from Earth. Also in the sector is a red supergiant star known as Murcheson's Eye. Associated with it is a yellow Sun-like star, which from New Caledonia appears in front of the Eye. Since some see the Eye and the Coalsack as the face of God, the yellow star is known as the Mote in God's Eye
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