20-light-year darkness is not empty space; it is a refusal of easy seeing. Dust sets the terms. The Elephant's Trunk is a dark nebula, a dense column in the IC 1396 star-forming region, where interstellar grains absorb and scatter starlight and leave embedded protostars behind a silhouette that seems almost deliberate.The apparent silence is deceptive. Not emptiness but a molecular cloud lies with...More