NGC 3603, NGC 3576 framing Nova Carinae in HDR

[avandonk]

Took this early this morning just after midnight.

Canon 5DH, Meade SN10. Hutech LPR filter. Exposures from 15s at 800 ISO to 4m at 800 ISO. Used EasyHDR to produce this image.

Full resolution 3.7MB
http://avandonkbl.bigblog.com.au/data/2/13839/image/novacar4444120081221140224.jpg

Below are two 100% crops with and without the nova.

Bert

[Barrykgerdes]

Hi Bert

I spent a little time trying to identify the star from the DSS and the Stellarium catalogues using your photo and it appears to be a rather insignificant BV-.63 16.1 mag star at 11h 13m 53.7secs -61d 13m 52.7secs. There were no other stars up to 18th magnitude within 5 arcseconds. I had to rotate your photo 90 deg CW to get north up before I could work it out.

Barry

[avandonk]

Here is a DSS1 image aligned with Registar.

Bert

[Barrykgerdes]

Yes that's the one I was looking at. The nova is about 1.5 arcseconds north of the star I mentioned and the star I was refering to is obscured by the nova. On my DSS image there is a smudge right on the centre of the nova that could be a star dimmer than the limit 22mag of the DSS image. That would almost get it into the super nova class.

Barry

[bojan]

And considering slow decline.. Very interesting specimen :-)

[avandonk]

A bit more information. The top nebula NGC 3578 is about 6000 light years away. The lower NGC 3603 is 20,000 light years away and we can only see the bright central part with its very young (one million years) bright star cluster as the rest is obscured by intervening dust and gas. It has been estimated to be about 1000 to 2000 light years across and would be the largest HII region in our Galaxy.
More info here
http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/nebulae/ngc3576.html

So I would put the (super?) nova at somewhere between these distances. Most probably nearer 20,000 light years.

Bert