Darkest part of the night sky?

[Serendipity]

This is one of those crazy questions that came up while I was writing some fiction... and could not readily find the answer on google...

Which part of the night sky is the darkest, once you take away the effects of the Sun and planets including Earth and its atmosphere?

 

[JunkMonkey]

I presume you mean just the visible (to humans) spectrum?

(I have no idea of the answer but would be intrigued to find out.)

 

[Mirannan]

I imagine that the area imaged by the Hubble Deep Field photograph would be a good candidate for this. After all, that (rather small!) patch was chosen specifically for the lack of objects in it. (Sure, that photo shows a lot of objects - but the exposure time was well over a week!)

If you're looking for a larger part of the sky, I imagine that the area around either galactic North or South would be the darkest since only nearby objects would be present. North might be marginally darker, since the Sun is currently about 100 light years above the galactic equator.

 

[Serendipity]

Many thanks for your replies - yes I did mean visible spectrum, JunkMonkey, though I would have quite happily accepted ultraviolet or infrared for plot purposes. Mirannan - thanks for the pointers... will use in current WIP unless someone else says better.

 

[Mirannan]

I did some digging, and found this picture embedded in Wikipedia. It's a picture of the entire sky, with the galactic equator running through the middle. It would appear that galactic North is probably the darkest area, and it's distinctly darker than the South. Here's the picture (admittedly in IR):

File:Milky Way infrared.jpg - Wikimedia Commons