Great Rift/meta

Wayne's Notes (2016)

Note that there really is an astronomical formation known as the Great Rift (also known as the Cygnus Rift) that lies approximately 100pc from Earth in a general Spinward/Corespinward to Coretrailing/Trailing arc in the sky. The real Great Rift is a series of overlapping molecular dust clouds (i.e. "Dark Nebulae") at varying distances between Earth and the Sagittarius Galactic Arm that obscure the starlight behind them from reaching Earth. However, unlike the Great Rift of Traveller which is largely a contiguous stellar void, the real Great Rift is largely an optical phenomenon of various smaller clouds at varying distances that likely contain many obscured stars, and are likely sites of active star formation.

The Great Rift begins at the constellation of Cygnus, and stretches all the way to the constellation of Centaurus.

This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at Great_Rift_(astronomy). The list of authors can be seen in the page history. The text of Wikipedia is available under the Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.