plan of the paper is as follows: we first describe the FIR observations, which revealed the feature, and present confirmatory evidence of its reality. We then attempt to derive additional properties of the feature, which has an approximate ring shape, using data in the optical and radio domains. We show that the dust in the feature does not seem to affect the stars in the Milky Way but that it apparently reddens galaxies in the VC and beyond. The full data set is discussed in the last section of the paper, in which we also derive some properties of the dust grains in the feature.

Observational data
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COBE/DIRBE
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Far infrared (FIR) observations from the COBE satellite, specifically with the DIRBE instrument, reveal non-uniform FIR emission from the center of the VC. The DIRBE instrument mapped the entire sky at ten wavelength bands from 1.25 to 240$\mu$m and operated from November 1989 to December 1993 (cryo-cooling was available only for ten months, restricting the availability of the FIR channels). An important feature of DIRBE was that the measurements were performed against an internal calibrator source, with proper accounting for instrumental offsets and interplanetary FIR emission. For the present analysis 