Originally posted by Redfang
Agreed, though it could be a little too dark in a mission where there isn't a star. 
And supernovae can leave black holes too, and they can't be seen anyway.
Um. No.
Gravitational collapse and supernova are mutually exclusive alternate events in a star's lifetime.
A supernova is a the violent shedding of a signifigant amount of a steller mass--and with it, the warping of local space-time it engenders. Post supernova, the star has enough mass to remain metastable for a while, as either a neutron star, white/red/brown dwarf, pulsar/quasar, etc.
A collapsar, such as a black hole, is pretty much the opposite. The warping of space-time around the star is such that a supernova could not occur. The star is too massive and cannot muster the explosive power to shed its outer layers. As the particles in the stellar body fuse into heavier and heavier (on the periodic table, not weight) elements, the star begins to lose the outward pressure that keeps it from collapsing. Since heavier elements fuse with signifigantly less energy with each step up the ladder they go, culminating at the iron limit, the star collapses in on itself to form a singularity.
Black holes are very unlikely to be found in nebulae outside of very dense stellar clusters, such as the center of a galaxy. In a nebula like the ones in Freespace, you're likely to find baby stars, in ones or twos.
