{"id":835103,"date":"2026-07-31T06:48:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T06:48:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/835103\/"},"modified":"2026-07-31T06:48:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T06:48:09","slug":"apod-2026-july-31-ngc-4372-and-dark-doodad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/835103\/","title":{"rendered":"APOD: 2026 July 31 – NGC 4372 And Dark Doodad"},"content":{"rendered":"

APOD<\/p>\n

Astronomy Picture of the Day<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\tDiscover the cosmos!<\/a> Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.\t\t\t<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tExplanation: The Dark Doodad Nebula drifts through southern skies<\/a>, a tantalizing target for binoculars toward the small constellation Musca<\/a>, The Fly. A dusty interstellar cloud, it’s seen against rich starfields just south of the Coalsack Nebula and the Southern Cross. Stretching for about 3 degrees across this telescopic field of view, the Dark Doodad<\/a> is punctuated near its southern tip (upper right) by yellowish globular star cluster NGC 4372<\/a>. Of course NGC 4372 roams the halo of our Milky Way<\/a> galaxy, a background object some 20,000 light-years away and only by chance along our line-of-sight to the Dark Doodad. About 700 light-years distant and over 30 light-years long, the Dark Doodad’s well defined silhouette belongs to the potentially<\/a> star-forming Musca molecular cloud<\/a>. The dusty Dark Doodad’s delightfully alliterative moniker was first coined by astro-imager and writer<\/a> Dennis di Cicco in 1986 while observing Comet Halley from the Australian outback.<\/p>\n

Tomorrow’s picture: pixels in space\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\/Public Release. This material from the originating organization\/author(s) might be of the point-in-time nature, and edited for clarity, style and length. Mirage.News does not take institutional positions or sides, and all views, positions, and conclusions expressed herein are solely those of the author(s).View in full here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":835104,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[64,63,128],"class_list":["post-835103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=835103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835103\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/835104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=835103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=835103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=835103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}