The Boogeyman Nebula

A dark silhouette, like a hunched creature, stands out against a faint red glow: this is LDN 1622, a dust cloud in the constellation of Orion nicknamed the Boogeyman Nebula. It does not shine on its own. Its cold, dense dust blocks the light of the stars behind it. The red glow in the background comes from the ionized hydrogen of the Barnard's Loop region, the huge arc of gas that surrounds Orion's Belt and Sword.

The cloud has a cometary shape, and its bright rim faces Barnard's Loop. Astronomers attribute it to the radiation of the hot stars of the Orion OB1 association, which shapes the surface of the cloud. Its distance is still debated. Some studies place it between 400 and 500 light-years, well in front of the great Orion nebulae. A 2008 study instead favours about 1,300 light-years, the same distance as the Orion B cloud it is projected onto.

This dark cloud is not asleep. It hosts at least thirty young stars, including several protostars still buried in the dust, most of them found by the Spitzer infrared space telescope. These stars are about one million years old. One of them ejects a jet of matter catalogued as HH 122. At 1,300 light-years, the cloud would contain about 1,100 solar masses of gas, yet less than 2% of this matter has turned into stars.

This image totals 28 h 20 min over five nights in November 2026, from Nevada. The luminance (12 h) brings out the shades of the dust, the red, green and blue layers give the natural colour, and a hydrogen narrowband layer strengthens the red background glow.