| Description | Dark Nebulae are an underappreciated feature of the heavens. They are basically the logistics chain aggregating raw atoms and feeding them to emission nebulae (in this case the pink area at the bottom of the frame, a portion of the North America Nebula, NGC 7000) where new stars are created. This is an enormous dark nebula, which extends past the top of this frame despite my using my widest-field telescope. The "funnel cloud" is less than half of the full dark nebula first described by Le Gentil, a French astronomer and contemporary of Messier, credited with discovering M32, M36, and M38. Le Gentil 1 & 2, btw, are lost to the mists of time. Le Gentil also has to be one of the most "hard luck" astronomers of all times... traveling to India in 1761 to observe a transit of Venus only to be delayed and miss his chance; he decided to stick around for 8 years until the next one, only to get clouded out. Returned to France to discover none of his letters had arrived home, he'd been declared legally dead, and his wife remarried. |
