APOD: 2026 July 31 – NGC 4372 and the Dark Doodad

NASA's latest Astronomy Picture of the Day features the Dark Doodad Nebula, a dusty cloud of interstellar gas and dust visible in the southern sky near the constellation Musca, the Fly. The nebula stretches across about three degrees of sky and measures over thirty light-years long, located roughly seven hundred light-years from Earth. At its edge sits NGC 4372, a yellowish globular star cluster that's actually much farther away—about twenty thousand light-years distant in the halo of our Milky Way galaxy. Per NASA, the Dark Doodad earned its delightfully whimsical name from astronomer Dennis di Cicco in nineteen eighty-six while observing Comet Halley from the Australian outback, and it's a potentially star-forming region that makes a tantalizing target for binoculars.

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