LDN 557 is a dark nebula in Serpens. Now you know as much about it as I do. There isn’t a lot of reference data available on many of these dark nebulae and none at all that I could find on the sone.

This does continue my “Summer of Darkness” where I seem to be concentrating on dark nebulae a lot. It’s been a fun summer for imaging and this was no exception. Most of these dark nebulae don’t have a lot of detail in them and this one was no exception. There is dust causing a reddening (really a “browning”) of the starlight shining through it and there is darkness where the dust is too thick for optical wavelengths to penetrate. If you remove the stars there isn’t much “there” there. You see some areas of brown and some areas of black or near black and that’s about it. These images need the stars to give some structure to the image and to create an outline of the darkness.

This is 25h 30m of RGB data. You can find the technical details at astrobin.