This is an image of RCW 55 in the constellation Carina I created in the past few days. I hereby claim 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 caputre 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.
This HII region is associated with one O8 V and six B-class stars according to Pinheiro et.al.. It lies in the midst of the Carina arc, about half way 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.