October 30, 2025
The universe has spent billions of years making things that shine. On your birthday, we celebrate one of its quieter masterpieces.
Lynds Dark Nebula 43
Birthday · October 30, 2025
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APOD published October 30, 2025. Credit: Team Ciel Austral. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Sure, Halloween is an astronomy holiday. But astronomers always enjoy scanning the heavens for spook-tacular galaxies, stars, and nebulae. This favorite is item number 43 from the Beverly Lynds 1962 Catalog of Dark Nebulae, fondly known as the Cosmic Bat nebula. While its visage looks alarmingly like a scary flying mammal, Lynds Dark Nebula 43 is over 12 light-years across. Glowing with eerie light, stars are forming within the dusty interstellar molecular cloud that is dense enough to appear in silhouette against a luminous background of Milky Way stars. Watch out. This Cosmic Bat nebula is a mere 400 light-years distant toward the serpent-bearing constellation Ophiucus.
Image credit: Team Ciel Austral