Note: This post has been substantially expanded in an edit.
Thanks, Dana, for the praise of my article about the Coalsack!
As I have not yet submitted it in IIS, I will start a new Science Thread which included my detailed article on the Coalsack.
Hey, Dana, were those extinction maps you presented from Herschel? Spitzer? 2MASS? other?? data.
I was not wrong when I said that the Coalsack remains an
unpopular subject for research......searching the ADS (= the database of astronomical papers, for those of you who don't know) yields only 10 mentions of the Coalsack in the Paper Abstracts between 2011 and 2015, and most of these papers do not deal individually with this Dark Nebula.
The Coalsack was supposed to be included in the Herschel Space Observatory infrared survey of Gould's Belt, but I am not aware of any publication presenting the Herschel far-infared data on the Coalsack, at any time since the observations were made. I have a nasty suspicion that Herschel never got to survey the Milky Way properly because it ran out of coolant; one of the greatest tragedies for astronomy. It was an instrument
easily as important as the HST, but apparently not able to be serviced.
I will try to extract some Far-infared observations of the Coalsack from the Herchel archive, if they are available. This is one of those very difficult "insiders only" data sources; that is nearly impenetrable to the ordinary mortal.
However, the Coalsack data
seems to be missing from the data archive of the Herschel Gould's Belt survey;
http://www.herschel.fr/cea/gouldbelt....php?id_ast=66
The NON star forming molecular cloud of the Coalsack is easily as important as the other similar clouds which HAVE formed stars, yet the other clouds have had much more study than the Coalsack.