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Concept
Zodiacal light
Summary
The zodiacal light (also called false dawn when seen before sunrise) is a faint glow of diffuse sunlight scattered by interplanetary dust. Brighter around the Sun, it appears in a particularly dark night sky to extend from the Sun's direction in a roughly triangular shape along the zodiac, and appears with less intensity and visibility along the whole ecliptic as the zodiacal band. Zodiacal light spans the entire sky and contributes to the natural light of a clear and moonless night sky. A related phenomenon is gegenschein (or counterglow), sunlight backscattered from the interplanetary dust, appearing directly opposite to the Sun as a faint but slightly brighter oval glow.
Zodiacal light is very faint, often outshined and rendered invisible by moonlight or light pollution.
The interplanetary dust in the Solar System forms a thick, pancake-shaped cloud called the zodiacal cloud which straddles the ecliptic plane. The particle sizes range from 10 to 300 micrometres, implying masses from one nanogram to tens of micrograms.
The Pioneer 10 and Helios spacecraft observations in the 1970s revealed zodiacal light to be scattered by the interplanetary dust cloud in the Solar System.
Analysis of images of impact debris from the Juno spacecraft shows that the distribution of the dust extends from Earth's orbit to the 4:1 orbital resonance with Jupiter at 2.06AU, and suggests that the dust is from Mars. However, no other dedicated dust instrumentation on Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Galileo, Ulysses, and Cassini found an indication that Mars is a significant source of dust besides comets and asteroids.
In the mid-latitudes, the zodiacal light is best observed in the western sky in the spring after the evening twilight has completely disappeared, or in the eastern sky in the autumn just before the morning twilight appears. The zodiacal light appears as a column, brighter at the horizon and tilted at the angle of the ecliptic.
Official source
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