Cygnus Rift

A dark mass in the central regions of Cygnus, directly southward of the star Deneb in the middle of the band of the Milky Way. The Cygnus Rift is approximately circular in shape, with an angular diameter of about 6° (or about twelve times the apparent diameter of the Moon's disc).

The Cygnus Rift is not in fact a 'rift' at all, but a dark cloud of dust that obscures the light from the stars and nebulae behind it (for this reason it is sometimes called the Northern Coalsack, after a similar structure in the southern sky). It forms the eastern extent of a long trail of obscuring dust, the Great Rift, that runs westward from Cygnus and stretches along about a third of the Milky Way's length.

The dark mass of the Cygnus Rift is about three hundred light years from the Solar System, and far behind it - at least a thousand light years farther away - lie vast clouds of ionising hydrogen creating a field of emission nebulae. These bright nebulae are almost entirely obscured by the darkness of the Rift, but their fringes can be seen, etched into elaborate shapes by the intervening dust. The North America Nebula is part of this fringe, stencilled by the edges of the Rift to give it a remarkable resemblance to the continent of North America on Earth. The nearby Pelican Nebula belongs to the same field, and on the opposite side of the Cygnus Rift part of another H II region can be glimpsed, known as the Sadr Region or the Gamma Cygni Nebula.