Category: Astronomy

As noted in an earlier post, Saturday was for dark nebulae. This is the iconic Trifid Nebula that everyone has seen in TV and movies if nowhere else. It has no relationship to those walking sunflowers.It has the name due to the dark lane cutting it into three sections. The Trifid is also known as Messier 20 and the dark lanes are known as Barnard 85. Here we have the smorgasbord of deep sky object types, the red is emission nebula, the blue reflection nebula, the dark, well, dark nebula. There is also a star cluster here as this is a stellar nursery creating stars like the nearby Lagoon Nebula and winter’s Orion Nebula.

Saturday night at the River Ridge Observatory, while my DSLR was busy with Cygnus nebulae, my 11″ SCT was busy looking at dark nebulae. Here are some in the Small Sagittarius Star Cloud which is about 16,000 light years away. The star cloud itself is too large for this setup so we only see about half of it. This is a star cloud but you can see patches where there aren’t so many. Those areas have dark nebula that blocks the stars behind them. The one nearest the center is Barnard 92 (B92) and the one to the right of it is Barnard 93. Using my imagination, B92 looks like a man with long skinny legs facing mostly away from us while B93 looks like a turtle standing on his back legs maybe holding something in his front legs.