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Barnard 44 – Reflection / dark nebula in Ophiuchus · AstroBrain

Barnard 44

LDN 1712

Set a site to see tonight's sky

When Barnard 44 is up, how long it stays usable and when it is in season all depend on where you observe from. Set your site and this page adds tonight's answer and its year.

Set it on Tonight

The science

What you are looking at

In one sentence

Cold dust dense enough to block the light of whatever lies behind it.

Class explainer for dark nebula (SIMBAD classification).

The facts

Barnard 44 is a reflection / dark nebula in Ophiuchus, catalogued as LDN 1712. SIMBAD gives its distance as 149 pc (−4 pc / +5 pc) — ≈ 486 ly, measured by parallax from 1 measurement. The light reaching us from it now left it around the year 1540 CE. On the sky it covers about 85′, estimated from the cloud's catalogued area — 2.7 times the full Moon. At that distance, that angle means it is roughly 12 light-years across.

Sources: AstroBrain catalogue; Barnard E.E. 1927, Carnegie Institution of Washington, via CDS/VizieR VII/220A; Lynds B.T. 1962, ApJS 7, 1, via CDS/VizieR VII/7A; CDS/SIMBAD astronomical database, Strasbourg (SIMBAD record LDN 1712 · distance from 2020A&A...633A..51Z). Contains information from SIMBAD, which is made available here under the Open Database License (ODbL). Download the SIMBAD-derived data.

For scale

Angular size, as it would sit on your sky.

12 ly

across — 3× the distance from the Sun to its nearest neighbour star (4.37 ly).

The same patch of sky in visible light

Sky image
Observatory photos and open-licence sky surveys.
Credits on each image.

Neighbours in the sky

Sky maths: apparent positions with refraction, one-minute steps; usable = full astronomical dark, at least 30° up and clear of your skyline. Survey images: CDS, Strasbourg (DSS2 and other surveys). Science: SIMBAD. The hours, heights and Moon on this page use no weather forecast; the rank is this target’s place in the Targets list, whose score also counts the cloud forecast when there is one.

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