Barnard 92

Barnard 92 is a dark nebula composed of dense interstellar dust that absorbs and blocks the light from the rich background of Milky Way stars behind it. This obscuration creates a striking dark silhouette projected against the bright star field of the Small Sagittarius Star Cloud, which is part of Messier 24 (M24).

Barnard 92 is located in the constellation Sagittarius, set against the Small Sagittarius Star Cloud that forms part of Messier 24 (M24). The star cloud is visible to the naked eye or binoculars under dark skies in the northern summer months when Sagittarius is prominent in the southern sky.

Barnard 92 was cataloged by the American astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard in his early 20th-century catalog of dark nebulae, which assigned numbers to dark obscuring clouds across the sky. It sits close to another dark nebula, Barnard 93, within the same region of the Small Sagittarius Star Cloud.

You can glimpse Barnard 92 as a dark gap using binoculars or a small telescope aimed at Messier 24, but larger instruments under very dark skies reveal its shape and contrast more clearly. The dark patch stands out because of the unusually dense star field of the Small Sagittarius Star Cloud behind it, not because the nebula itself emits light.