Dark Nebula Lynds 323 (Barnard 92)

full size jpg (204 kb)

This dark nebula is known as Lynds 323  (also as Barnard 92). It is located some 10,000 light year away in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. It is near the open star cluster M 24, which it partially obscures. It was discovered by E.E. Barnard in 1913.

Our Milky Way Galaxy contains innumerable stars and dense clouds of gas and dust.  Some of our galaxy's clouds are dense enough to obscure the light of the stars behind them.  From our location in the galaxy we see this nebula in front of one of our galaxy's densest regions of stars.  The dark regions in the center of the image is a dense cloud that blocks the light of a great many stars.  Stars that look red in this image are actually embedded within the nebula and have had their light reddened by it.

The image above can be placed into context by comparing it with an image from the Second Palomar Observatory Sky Survey.  Here is an image (687  kb) of Lynds 323 and the area around it.  The image is one half of a degree on a side. A red square marks the field of view seen in the color image above.  Here is the image without the square (662 kb).

The color image was obtained using the Palomar Observatory's 60-inch Telescope by and Ben Weiss and Antonin Bouchez of the California Institute of Technology.   This color image is composed of three images taken with g (180 seconds), r (300 seconds), and i (300 seconds) filters displayed as blue, green, red.  

The black and white image was obtained from the second National Geographic Palomar Observatory Sky Survey.  Images were recorded with the Palomar Observatory's 48-inch Schmidt telescope, now known as the Samuel Oschin Telescope.

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