Names, maps for Milky Way dust clouds? (Dark Cloud Constellations)

Question

There is a nice image of the Milky Way, labeled with constellations, at 360°x45° panorama with constellations:

It leads me to wonder how much we know about the Great Rift, Coalsack and other prominent dust clouds that obscure the stars in the background.

• Are there names for other clouds that can be distinguished by eye (in dark places)? How far away is the dust?

• Do we have any 3D maps of these dust clouds? My web searches haven't turned up much along these lines.

Update: I know there is a huge variety of information on the brighter nebulae and smaller telescopic Messier objects. I'm looking for information on the dust clouds "visible" to the naked eye.

Answer 1

The man who catalogued the most dark nebulae was E. E. Barnard, the same person who discovered Barnard's Star. These nebulae are known by the numbers in Barnard's catalog, such as B.33, the Horsehead Nebula.

Barnard was one of the first people to apply photography to astronomy, and one result was a stunningly illustrated volume of dark nebulae.

Answer 2

Astronomers have been very good at giving names to all possible dark patches, nebulae and clouds that they could find. Currently there are numerous catalogues published in professional literature and online archives. Most of the times the objects, say some dark patch, was given different names by different studies so to answer to your general question - yes, they all have their names. If you are interested in learning about them you might try to use some general planetarium-like software, say Stellarium or Google Earth has a sky feature. With those two you can get names for some of the famous ones. If you want to go further you could have a look at Simbad which is mostly for professional use, but it's still fun to poke around.

Regarding to your question on 3D distribution of those structures, we can't look at them while living inside. But from the overall distribution we have a reasonably good idea about the overall distribution of those clouds. This is not an easy task since there is so much dust and gas in our way that we have to use some different types of observations to get the picture. There are some models which produce the 3D distribution according to our current knowledge, but, as you might imagine, it is constantly changing and improving. To get an idea on how different universe looks at different wave-bands have a look at Chromoscope.

A couple of more resources (after the requested edit):

• http://www.wikisky.org/
• http://darkclouds.u-gakugei.ac.jp/
• http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/bib_query?1962ApJS....7....1L Lynds Catalogue

Answer 3

I ran across a name for what I'm searching for: "dark cloud constellations". To see them, you need to experience the kind of dark skies that much of humanity grew up with. In the southern hemisphere, where the center of the galaxy can go high in the sky and cast a shadow, it is easier to discern them, and many cultures gave these figures names:

Constellation (Wikipedia):

Some cultures have discerned shapes in these patches and have given names to these "dark cloud constellations." Members of the Inca civilization identified various dark areas or dark nebulae in the Milky Way as animals, and associated their appearance with the seasonal rains.[4] Australian Aboriginal astronomy also describes dark cloud constellations, the most famous being the "emu in the sky" whose head is formed by the Coalsack.

One nice, detailed map and list of these, with lots of names, from an Inca perspective is here: www.astronomy.pomona.edu/archeo/andes/startable3.html - it would be nice to see this information used to label the image in the original question.

The Australian emu in the sky is enormous, and looks like this (stretching from nearly Aquila on the left to Crux on the right):

Update: Here are other named dark cloud constellations that can be seen with the naked eye under good conditions, besides the Great Rift and Coalsack already mentioned in the question:

• Dark horse, which incorporates the Pipe Nebula as its rear legs and hind quarters. The Pipe Nebula itself is composed of Barnard 59, 65–67, and 78.
• Dark River, which connects the forelegs of the Dark Horse with Iota Scorpii: The Dark River to Antares (APOD). It is about 500 light years away.

Answer 4

You can find a really interesting map of Milky Way dust clouds in Face-on map overview on Galaxy Map: