Dark Shark Nebula

LDN 1235 in Cepheus is a dense dark nebula — a cold cloud of dust and molecular gas that emits nothing of its own and shows only as a silhouette against the faint glow behind it. It is the darkest core of a larger, very faint complex catalogued as LBN 535, part of the Cepheus Flare star-forming region, and Beverly Lynds listed it in her 1962 catalogue of dark nebulae; the shark is the pattern the dust makes, with the dark eye on the left and the body trailing off to the right. Two small blue reflection nebulae sit inside it, where starlight is scattered by the surrounding dust: vdB 149, lit by BD+72 1018, and vdB 150, lit by HD 210806, both young B8-type stars. It lies roughly 650 light-years away, though some studies place it nearer 1,200, and the cloud is only a few million years old, still forming stars at its densest points. The nebula is faint enough that the long integration here, gathered over two nights, is doing most of the work.