Known as
Hen 2-104 or
The Southern Crab (hopefully the reason for its name is pretty obvious and much more fitting than for its northern cousin in Taurus?) this Symbiotic Star system is a relatively recently identified object in Centaurus, with its true nature only revealed as recently as 1989 in comparatively primitive
B&W images taken with the 2.2m telescope at La Silla at ESO. More recently in 1999 the Hubble Space Telecope released a very famous and highly detailed image of it which put it well and truly on my all time favourite HST images list.
This target was suggested to me by my mate Sakib Rasool (a man with a veritable mine field of cool object suggestions, especially planetary nebulae, in his archives!) and given my existing fascination with the object, I decided to have a crack. I could find no amateur images of it on line.
Of course, until recently I never expected to be able to do such a tiny faint object justice, given the faintest furthest most extensions of the nebula measure just 80" X 40" so it would make it another genuine challenge for my equipment and site conditions.... buuuut aaas usual and looking to do more than the Ol' Eta Carina Nebula these days
my goal was to never less try and reveal as much of the outer hourglass structure and fine fiery filamentary details as possible
and hopefully 
unearth the tiny inner 10" hourglass structure from the bright glow of the central star and that looked so cool in the Hubble image!
As seems to be a relatively regular occurrence, my Wallaroo skies were pretty cooperative in my endeavour and delivered some nice seeing over 3 full and rather cool, clear nights in April, with one really excellent steady night. So with the longer nights and my now rather robot like efficient
manual operation
, I managed to take the longest ever exposure I have done with the AG12 astrograph, at nearly 22hrs
I am very happy with the result from an F3.8 1120mm FL 12" scope on this tiny but intriguing and never imaged object
The Southern Crab 150% close in crop
Hubble comparison I got the tiny inner hourglass rings!! yaaay
Full 38' X 30' Frame just to show how small this damn thing is!
The nature of this Symbiotic system is well documented in this
excellent paper
A more outreach friendly description of the object is available
HERE
Enjoy
EDIT: Ok, just discovered that the CHART 32 team did a lovely one
HERE...but with a 1m class pro level scope at a pro observatory site, with sub arc sec seeing, they are not reeeally amateurs like the rest of us amateurs
Mike
The thing is, there are just sooo many of these intriguing blighters across the sky and available during all seasons too...love picking on a few here and there 
, I am learning to trust that my processing abilities, amassed over nearly 4 decades of doing this, can make something of what can initially look rather flimsy 
