Oh me, oh my!
A GIANT has been resplendent in our sky, yet it has gone totally unnoticed by nearly EVERYONE!
Tony, I was first going to comment about your wonderful composition, on how you put M6 off-centre, and with that bulb of round red nebulosity below it. The composition of your photo is really wonderful, which is what makes it so appealing and beautiful
But I then took a closer look at your photo, and noticed something odd about it. I am very familiar with this area of the sting of Scorpio, but I did not recognize that bright red patch of an emission nebula. This is a MASSIVE object, over 2° in diameter, yet it is totally UNKNOWN!!!!
There is plenty of dark nebulosity all around it, and this is well listed in catalogues, but the emission nebula is totally unknown! If you look carefully at the dark pillars and Bok gloduals in this patch of red, they ALL radiate out from a common point - a single bright star in the centre of this ball of red. As it happens, this star is an O7V supergiant star in the tiny cluster NGC 6374. And this nebula is blowing out and ionzied by the radiation of this massive star! This whole emission nebula is a giant version of the Rosette Neb, the Lagoon and the cluster Trumpler 14 in Eta Carina.
But because it is faint (due to its size), it has gone totally unnoticed! And it took a bit of looking around for the name of this monster nebula.
Behold,
emission nebula LBN1117!
The cluster at the center of this nebula is very young. The dominant star in it, this O7V O-type star is lean in Helium in its spectrum, the first part of the clue to its tender years. And the nebulosity itself is a giant cosmic bubble that is on the verge of disappearing into the abyss of space it is so big. Another clue to the young age of the star and nebula is the small size of the cluster and the close proximity of the component stars to each other - they haven't had enough time to move away from each other.
Another interesting feature here is with M6. Despite that many of its component stars are B-type (the next stellar type below O-type), the material that it was formed from has totally dissipated, leaving the cluster alone, and its component stars are much more widely spaced than in NGC 6374. M6 is a much older cluster. All of this adds to the truly complex nature of Tony's photo!
And it doesn't stop there! Immediately to the right is another big emission nebula, and it too is centered around another O-type star, and just like LBN1114, it is faint and poorly known as it is not as bright as the brighter Cat's Paw and War & Peace nebulae. But both the Cat's Paw and War & Peace neb' are dwarfed in size by LBN1114! It's going to take a bit more research to find the name of this other smaller emission nebula.
O-type stars are as big as stars get. These are the suckers that go BOOM!
HOLY COW! I never knew of the existence of this MASSIVE emission nebula right overhead right now! 2° in flaming diameter!!! And yet it is an extremely obscure object!!!
Very well done, Tony!
Not only have you captured a gorgeous part of the sky, but your processing was such that it brought out of obscurity a truly magnificent giant of the sky!
I'm going to have a shot at trying to spot this sucker this coming new Moon weekend with my 8" f/4 dobbie. Man, it's going to suck my eyeballs out trying to spot it, but I think I have a fighting chance with this scope
Alex.