  The shadow of a black hole or a collapsing star is of great importance as we
can extract important properties of the object and of the surrounding spacetime
from the shadow profile. It can also be used to distinguish different types of
black holes and ultra compact objects. In this work, we have analytically
calculated the shadow of a higher dimensional collapsing dark star, described
by higher dimensional Vaidya metric, by choosing a slightly generalized version
of Misner--Sharp mass function. We have also numerically investigated the
properties of the shadows of the black holes and the collapsing stars for a
slightly more general mass function. Examining the potential influence of extra
spatial dimensions on the shadow, we have explored the possibility of
distinguishing higher dimensions from the standard four-dimensional spacetime.
