The Dark Doodad

[marco (Marco Lorenzi)]

Hi to all, a few days ago I uploaded on my website a picture of this popular target but I found only now the time to post it on this forum:

The Dark Doodad

This lovely dark nebula drifts through a very rich starfield in the constellation of Musca, The Fly, just few degrees southern than the CoalSack in Crux.
The star field here is very dense which makes the nebula well visible with binoculars but that complicates a lot the processing of CCD images.
The length of the Doodad is about 3 degrees, which has forced me to to pursue another mosaic to image the whole shebang. I pushed particularly with the luminance in order to have good details of the darker areas without penalizing excessively the the background noise. The very nice globular cluster NGC 4372, visible on the left, is showing lots of little stars with different colors, a characteristics often I see missing in other images of the area. The image is shown at 75% of the original resolution (that is about 7000x4000 pixels) to maintain the size of the Jpeg "manageable".

As usual, I hope you will like it. Technical details are visible on the website.

Clear skies
Marco

[Stevec35 (Steve)]

Very nice Marco! You've brought out the fainter bits of dust in the area which you usually don't see in other images. Your usual top class image.

Steve

[strongmanmike (Michael)]

Hmmm? Gee, I have to say I am surprised at the very low number of stars in this image .....naaaah just kidding! Awesome Marco, what a vast display of stars that is and the dust streak is cool too of course, lovely


Mike

[gregbradley]

That's a fantastic image Marco. You got a great separation of the dark doodad from its bright starry background.

Greg.

[Peter Ward]

Simply beautiful.

[Somnium (Aidan)]

very nice !

[IanP]

natürlich wunderbar !!!

[Andy01 (Andy)]

Bazinga! That's how it's done sir, well done!

[Atmos (Colin)]

Great image there! I took a really wide field a few months back of this area, my globular cluster looked like a kinda unresolved smudge
So many stars, so MANY stars

[RobF (Rob)]

As usual, I do greatly love this

Marco, just spectacular - subtle processing that makes it look so natural, but its really a challenging area to process. Congrats!

[RickS (Rick)]

Lovely image, Marco!

[Paul Haese]

Lovely image with excellent processing. The colour is very nice and the faint dust in the region is well shown. I had to do two panels too when I imaged it a few years back. However I did not get the same field of view. I like your field of view better.

[marc4darkskies (Marcus)]

Gorgeous Marco! Superb colour & processing!

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Beautiful Marco I started looking at all the detail in the glob and then zoomed out to get it in context

[marco (Marco Lorenzi)]

Thanks everybody for the appreciation! For some reasons the quoting tag in the forum is not working on my PC so I cannot thanks one by one, anyway your comments are really appreciated!

I have just replaced the image in my home page with a version where I have corrected an excess of Cyan on the blue stars of the field (in particular the brightest one), so now it should be a little bit better and more balanced, in particular the invasive halo..

Thanks to everyone of you for the time you spent to comment my effort

Clear skies
Marco

[cazza132 (Troy Casswell)]

Very nice image Marco! Congratulations for the APOD!!!!

[topheart]

A worthy APOD. Congratulations!

Cheers,
Tim

[marco (Marco Lorenzi)]

Thank you Tim and Troy for the appreciation, this APOD was a nice even if a bit unexpected surprise!
Clear skies
Marco

[Rex]

Another fantastic image Marco, probably the best I have seen of this object.

[Ryderscope (Rodney)]

Thanks for posting this Marco. It is a great image and a good incentive to delve into the Dark Doodad when it swings around again.