This is an image of RCW 55 in the constellation Carina I created in the past few days. I hereby offer the challenge that this is the best existing image of that obscure object that has ever been published! If you question that, do a web search. The key is that RCW 55 is so faint, tiny, and obscure that even the RCW image lists have skipped it. I also hereby designate it "The Flying Tadpole Nebula".
Here are the gory details:
Right ascension: 10h 56m 32.39s
Declination -63˚ 00’ 47.6”
Galactic Longitude: 290˚ 24’ 00.0”
Galactic Latitude -03˚ 00’ 00.0”
Central ionizing
star CP -62 1825
Distance ~4,300 pc (~14,025 light-years) (
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bibcode=1984NInfo..56...59A)
Equipment:
Planewave CDK24
FLI PL9000
Mathis MI-2000-1250 mount
37x600 sec exposures (3 hr 10 min) in Ha, SII, and OIII. Data capture 10-17 December 2021. Equipment hosted and data captured by Telescope Live at the El Sauce Observatory in Chile.
Filter mapping HSO, Hydrogen-alpha to red, Sulfur II to Green, and Oxygen III to blue. Processed in Astro Pixel Processor. Final color adjustment in Adobe Lightroom Classic.
- Using Astro Pixel Processor and Lightroom, I adjusted the
star colors to be as close to RGB visual as possible.
ACCORDING TO PINHEIRO ET. AL, this HII region is associated with one O8 V and six B-class
stars. It lies in the midst of the Carina arc, about halfway between the Car OB2 association and the massive
star formation region RCW 49. (Information gathered from
http://galaxymap.org/cat/view/rcw/55, 22 Feb 2022.) For reference, it is located next to HD 95589. You can find the faint fuzzy spot in Sky-map.org, where I first noticed it. Sky-map.org, by the way, is a great source for finding odd "fuzzies" that don't show up in planetarium programs.
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