Chamaeleon III Dark Cloud

Located in the Chamaeleon Complex, a large star forming region at the surface of the Local Bubble, we find the Chamaeleon III Dark Cloud that appears to be devoid of current star-formation activity. Located some 500 light-years from Earth in the Chamaeleon constellation we find this rich field of stars and dark nebulae, not far from the south celestial pole.

The image was captured last July 2024 during my last trip to the Kalahari desert, Tivoli Astrofarm, Namibia. The Namibian Bortle 1 dark sky it’s a really great place to capture images of these faint molecular clouds.

I used my small 300mm focal length refractor to capture 8h of Luminance data that has given all the image details to the resulting work. I also gathered more than 2h in each of the R, G, B filters in order to get a good natural color mapping. Short 30″ R,G,B images have been captured to preserve the star colors (not saturated in its cores). The 300″ R,G,B images were only used to give the natural color to the dark cloud and also a distant galaxy (IC 3104) that can be found in the upper left part of the image.

The full image shown above covers an area of 4º26′ x 2º57′ at a resolution of 2.59″/pixel.