Dark Nebula LDN 673 in Aquila | Schulman Telescope

Dark Nebula LDN 673 in Aquila | Schulman Telescope

Lynds’ Dark Nebula 673 (or LDN 673) is located in the constellation Aquila, the Eagle. This dark nebula is at a distance of about 600 light years. Expansive molecular clouds in the Aquila rift make the distant stars appear reddish, while the very dense LDN 673 nebula completely blocks the starlight. You can find LDN 673 in the summer skies near bright star Altair and the Summer Triangle (Coordinates: RA 19h 20m 55s) in the northern hemisphere.

Sometimes it is what you do not see that makes a picture interesting. In this case, starlight in the thick of the Milky Way is being obliterated by dust and soot that makes up the dark lanes of our galaxy.  LDN673 is a molecular cloud of gigantic proportions—it is around 67 trillion kilometers across. Such molecular clouds are places where stars are born, and there may be enough matter in this regions to form hundreds of thousands of new stars.

The Aquila Rift forms a great mass of dark molecular clouds along the summer Milky Way through the constellations Aquila, Serpens, and eastern Ophiuchus. Many of them have been identified and catalogued in 1962 by B.T. Lynds in his "Catalogue of dark nebulae". 

Together with the Vulpecula Rift and the Cygnus Rift or Northern Coalsack, the Aquila Rift is part of the so-called Great Rift (also Dark Rift, or Dark River), which is a series of overlapping, non-luminous, molecular dust clouds that are located between the Solar System and the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.

The Great Rift appears as a dark lane that obscures the bright star fields behind it, splitting the crowded plane of our Milky Way galaxy into two as seen from Earth. These clouds are estimated to contain about 1 million solar masses of plasma and dust.

Image Data: Schulman 32-inch RCOS Telescope

Camera SBIG STX16803

The 0.81 m (32 in) Schulman Telescope is a Ritchey-Chrétien reflector built by RC Optical Systems and installed in 2010. It is operated by the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter and is Arizona's largest dedicated public observatory. The Schulman Telescope was designed from inception for remote control over the Internet by amateur and professional astrophotographers worldwide. It is currently the world's largest telescope dedicated for this purpose.

Image Credit: Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona

Release Date: April 1, 2012

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