Zodiacal Light

So I had read about the Zodiacal Light in one of the astronomy magazines and now that I live in a good dark place I was wondering if I could see it. What is the Zodiacal Light? From the wikipedia page:

The zodiacal light is a faint, roughly triangular, whitish glow seen in the night sky which appears to extend up from the vicinity of the sun along the ecliptic or zodiac. In mid-northern 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.

I did some quick googling and found that the best time to see it is 2 to 3 hours before sunrise and certainly when the moon is goon. It is so faint, they say, thay any light pollution or moon will make it impossible to see. Sunrise was at 6:49AM so I set the alarm for 4:45AM and it fails to go off, but fortunately Jeannette had also set hers, she has a conference is Boston this weekend, so her alarm woke me. I dressed quickly and dashed out of the house, driving to Coast Guard beach, a local beach in the Cape Cad National Seashore that faces north east.

I drove down the road with high beams on, to make sure that I didn't hit any coyotes, turned into the parking lot and got out.

There it was. The only dark adaptation I had was from driving down a dark road. It was clear that it wasn't the Milky Way, that was visible to the right and all across the sky.

Photo from http://www.astrophoto.com/ZodiacalLight.htm

I stayed and observed for a bit, quickly grabbing M41 just beneath Sirius and of course M42 in Orion. I was pleased to see how gorgeous M42 was. I look at it a few weeks ago as it rose one evening and it was too low to show its glory. High in the sky, well, it was wonderful as usual.

But back to the Zodiacal Light. I primarily brought the binoculars to give me something to do while I dark adapted. I knew I wasn't going to wait half an hour to get fully dark adapted so playing around the the Canons gave my pupils a few minutes to expand. The light extended from the horizon (obviously) and rose about half the way towards zenith, going up at a slight angle to the right, maybe 60 to 70 degrees. It was not colored at all. I can see how it would be mistaken for a false dawn except the shape was all wrong, it was a soft triangle.

What I saw wasn't as bright as the internet photo above, nor was there a birdhouse, but that shows approximately what I saw. I'll try and take my own photo of it one of these days.

What causes it? Quoting the wikipedia again:

The zodiacal light is produced by sunlight reflecting off dust particles which are present in the solar system and known as cosmic dust. Consequently, its spectrum is the same as the solar spectrum. The material producing the zodiacal light is located in a lens-shaped volume of space centered on the sun and extending well out beyond the orbit of Earth. This material is known as the interplanetary dust cloud. Since most of the material is located near the plane of the solar system, the zodiacal light is seen along the ecliptic.

And curiously, Dr. Brian May's, thesis, A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud, was on the Zodiacal Light. Dr. May wrote the thesis in the early 70's but abandoned astrophysics to become the lead guitarist for the rock band Queen.