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Seeking Summer's Dark Nebulae

Dark cosmic clouds are revealed as celestial silhouettes.

by Alan Whitman

Summer Milky Way on the horizon
The grand sweep of the summer Milky Way hugs the southeastern horizon in this wide-field photograph by Akira Fujii. The Great Rift, seen here as a line of dark patches bisecting the star fields of our galaxy, spans more than a third of the sky. Venus is rising at lower center. Click on the image for a better view of the Great Rift.
Dark nebulae can be enjoyed with the unaided eye, or with binoculars and rich-field telescopes (RFTs), or with the largest amateur instruments. Sometimes called absorption nebulae, they range from small black voids a few arcminutes across to the Great Rift stretching more than 120° from Deneb to Alpha Centauri.

After the Great Rift, what's the easiest naked-eye dark nebula for Northern Hemisphere observers? I'd say it's the large wedge near the Cepheus-Cygnus border. It descends south from a wide, dark mass to a tapered tip 10° east of Deneb. Curiously, this prominent and widely known black cloud is unnamed. I call it the Funnel Cloud nebula.

Both the Great Rift and the Funnel Cloud are visible even when a nine-day-old Moon is in the sky — if the atmosphere is clean enough that the scattering of moonlight is minimal and no other light pollution is present.

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