Owing to their faintness and the relatively barren part of the sky in which they are located, these objects are rarely imaged by amateur astronomers.

The above image shows four distinct Barnard dark nebulae objects, B30, B31, B32 and B225. These dark nebulae lie along the margins of a much larger, nearly circular in shape emission nebula, Sharpless 2-264 (aka Cedeblad 54). Sharpless 2-264 has an apparent diameter spanning about 8 degrees of sky or 16 Full Moon diameters. Simply mouseover the image with your cursor to see these Barnard and Sharpless designations appear superimposed on the image.

This complex of objects lies about 1300 light years from Earth and is located just to the northwest of the triangular grouping of stars marking the head of the constellation Orion The Hunter. Recently, the Spitzer Space Telescope project identified this area as a star-birthing region with numerous low mass stars and brown dwarfs.