Credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/T. A. RectorImage processing: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF’s NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF’s NOIRLab) & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)

The shadowy clouds of LDN 1622 are pictured in this observation from the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. This image was captured in 2018 by the Mosaic-3 instrument, a wide-field camera used to capture large swaths of the night sky from Kitt Peak in Arizona. Mosaic-3 has since been retired to make way for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), the most powerful multi-object survey spectrograph in the world. This swap highlights one of the benefits of ground-based astronomy: the ability to upgrade and replace instruments as new technologies become available. LDN 1622 is a dark nebula, so called because these dense interstellar clouds of gas and dust blot out light from background objects, appearing as ink-dark clouds against a backdrop of stars. This enigmatic cosmic cloud lies 1300 light-years from Earth in the nearby Orion complex, a star-forming region thronging with young stars and other dark nebulae. This observation was taken before the 2022 Contreras Fire, which affected KPNO.

Provider: NOIRLab

Image Source: https://noirlab.edu/public/images/iotw2325a/

Curator: NSF's NOIRLab, Tucson, AZ, USA

Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License