The Doodad nebula and a hidden cluster

Close to the south celestial pole, in the Musca constellation, we can find this amazing brown ribbon, known as the Dark Doodad nebula. Under pristine dark skies it can be distinguished with the use of a small telescope. Its dark color comes from the interstellar dust that scatters visible light. This huge structure lays some 700 light-years from Earth and spans for over 30 light-years long, about 3 degrees in this image (6 full Moons in diameter).

Hidden behind this long molecular cloud we can distinguish a beautiful globular cluster, catalogued as NGC 4372. Like the other globulars, it remains at the halo of our Milky Way, a background object located some 20,000 light-years away from Earth. This cluster is partially obscured by the Doodad’s nebula dust lanes. It has a fairly low surface brightness, and like many globular clusters, it is composed of older stars, many of which are red giants, and is a remnant of the early stages of the Milky Way’s formation. In the upper right of the image we can also see the bright blue star gamma Muscae.

I captured this image during my visit to Namibia, Tivoli Astrofarm (Kalahari desert) last July 2024. The perfect Bortle 1 dark sky allowed me to go quite deep in this image although I only captured 12h 50′ of data with the use of L, R, G, B filters. It took me almost one week to process this precious data.

The full image shown above covers an area of 4º28′ x 2º58′ at a resolution of 2.59″/pixel.