A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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zodiacal band
The zodiacal band is the extremely faint strip of light that connects the zodiacal light in the west to the gegenschein opposite the sun, running all the way across the sky along the plane of the solar system. It is the same dust doing the same thing at its faintest, and seeing the whole band at once requires a very dark site, a moonless night, clear air, and a dark-adapted eye.
Etymology
The word zodiac is Greek for a circle of little animals, from the figures the ancient constellations along the sun’s path were seen as. The band, the light, and the gegenschein are three names for three parts of one thing.
Notes
The dust responsible comes largely from comets shedding material and from collisions in the asteroid belt, and it spirals slowly inward toward the sun, which means the whole cloud has to be continuously resupplied or it would be gone. Seeing the complete band is one of the standard tests of how dark a site really is, and from most of the inhabited world it is no longer possible.