Dark Shrouds in Orion

The shadowy clouds of LDN 1622 are pictured in this observation from the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. This image was captured in 2018 by the Mosaic-3 instrument, a wide-field camera used to capture large swaths of the night sky from Kitt Peak in Arizona.

Mosaic-3 has since been retired to make way for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument
(DESI), the most powerful multi-object survey spectrograph in the world. This swap highlights one of the benefits of ground-based astronomy: the ability to upgrade and replace instruments as new technologies become available.

LDN 1622 is a dark nebula, so called because these dense interstellar clouds of gas and dust blot out light from background objects, appearing as ink-dark clouds against a backdrop of stars. This enigmatic cosmic cloud lies 1300 light-years from Earth in the nearby Orion complex, a star-forming region thronging with young stars and other dark nebulae.

This observation was taken before the 2022 Contreras Fire, which affected KPNO.