It's tempting to think that the region of the ecliptic directly opposite the sun would be the darkest region ever, but that's not the case. In fact, there's a faint brightening of the night sky at that region. The Germans have a term for it: gegenschein or "counter glow."

To see it, you'll have to wait for the sky to get really, really dark.  You'll know you've spotted it when you see a faint, yet discernible glow. Small, interplanetary dust particles - millimeter-sized particles from asteroids that orbit in the ecliptic plane of planets - tend to back-scatter sunlight and cause the gegenschein.

The photograph you see above was taken over the Paranal Observatory in Chile. Of particular interest to note is that a glow surrounding the gegenschein itself is visible. The Andromeda galaxy may be seen to the lower left of the glow and the Pleiades star cluster toward the horizon.