Sky and Telescope - June 2017 - 73

u SHARKS AND WOLVES Cepheus is home to many dark nebulae,
including LDN 1235, the Dark Shark (top), which really resembles its informal name. Roughly 3° to its southeast lies vdB 152 and Barnard 175,
known together as the Wolf's Cave. Both objects extend much farther
than implied on most star charts.
u COLORFUL BOUNDARY The giant molecular clouds within Orion are
home to a variety of challenging targets, including dark nebula LBN 1622
at top left and reflection nebula M78 at bottom right, separated by a
brighter portion of Barnard's Loop.

the Day website as a "celestial still life." Indeed, the region
is awash with bluish reﬂection nebulae, patches of pinkish
hydrogen-alpha emission, jagged dark rifts of dark nebulae,
and broad swaths of dust. Moderate-to-large-aperture instruments work well to capture the delicate details, while even
telephoto lenses can record these GMCs in their entirety.
A far more challenging target toward the northwest, the
Taurus Molecular Cloud 1 (TMC-1) can be found just
north of the Hyades and extends westward past the California Nebula (NGC 1499) and the Pleiades (M45). It lies at a
distance of only about 450 light-years, though in roughly the
opposite direction as the Rho Ophiuchi GMC. Unlike the
Orion GMCs, this complex is much more rareﬁed and has
relatively few bright nebulae embedded within. Deep in the
heart of the GMC and about 1¼° west of 44 Tauri is the very
faint nebula LBN 777, sometimes referred to as the Vulture
Head or Baby Eagle Nebula. The 15′-by-10′ "head" features a
dark brownish patch of opaque dust (B207) located above the
clearing that forms the "eye."

TOP: JOHN DAVIS; BOT TO M: DAVID MIT TELM A N

Additional Targets
Very few references have been written on imaging these
challenging deep-sky objects. Edward Emerson Barnard's
1913 classic A Photographic Atlas of Selected Areas of the Milky
Way is a good place to start your research. Even better are
Beverly Lynds' catalogs of bright and dark nebulae (LDN and
LBN, respectively), both published in the 1960s and based
on examination of the red and blue plates of the Palomar
Sky Survey. They give not only positional and size data but
also present relative opacity of dust and the nebula's brightness on a 1-to-6 scale. Other resources include Sidney van
den Bergh's (vdB) 1966 catalog of 159 reﬂection nebulae. For
galactic cirrus, the online resources are much more limited.
The best place to start is with Steve Mandel's page (galaxyimages.com) and perhaps searching online for images others
have recently produced.
The good news is that all of these references have been
scanned and are readily available online. Powerful applications such as The SkyX or SkySafari Pro include many of these
objects, as well as a number of the giant molecular cloud
complexes. So if you spend some time exploring these and
other resources, you might become the ﬁrst person to image a
portion of dusty GMC or lacy galactic cirrus in color.
¢ RICHARD JAKIEL hunts galactic molecular clouds from his

backyard in rural Georgia.
s k y a n d t e l e s c o p e .c o m

* JUNE 2017

http://www.galaxyimages.com http://www.galaxyimages.com http://www.skyandtelescope.com

Sky and Telescope - June 2017

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