Nebula in the constellation Ophiuchus

Barnard took this splendid picture in the summer of 1895 with the Willard lens. It took seven and a half hours to record the delicate details of the nebula, during which his entire attention had to be focused on guiding his camera with perfect precision. The existence of the faint nebulosity, though suspected by Barnard from earlier visual observations, was, like many of the features in his Milky Way series, discovered with his camera.

In the 1890s it was not known whether dark features like the ones radiating from this nebula were starless areas or regions where stars were obscured by opaque dust in the foreground. Barnard correctly held them to be the latter.

When, in 1913, his Mount Hamilton photographs were finally published in Volume XI of Publications of Lick Observatory, Barnard wrote of this image: "I do not think there is any other region of the heavens so extraordinary as this . . . in the immediate vicinity of rho Ophiuchi. One hesitates at any attempt to describe it."

Lick photographic plate archive. This image has been cropped from the original plate.