NGC 2070 and SN 1987A – Astrodrudis

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There is a previous image of this target in this web site, taken with a 20″ telescope, that can be found here.

This area is a large emission nebula region, located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (which, by the way, is the largest satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way). This nebula is so huge that, should it be at the same distance of M42, the Orion Nebula, it would span about 75 degrees, one fifth of the sky, close to one half of what is visible in every single moment (180 degrees). Were it at this distance, its brightness would even cast shadows.

This area, also known as 30 Doradus, was considered to be a single star, until Nicolas Louis de Lacaille (1751) discovered its “cloudy” nature. It is the region with the highest star formation rate known in our Local Group. This may be due to the fact that this nebula lies in the leading side of the movement of the LMC, and it is, therefore, exposed to the pressure of the colliding intergalactic medium. It is powered by the numerous stars of its central open cluster NGC 2070 (the real owner of this name…). This cluster is undergoing such a high rate of star birth that, taking into account that its gas mass is about 450,000 solar masses, it is expected to originate a globular cluster in the future.

In this area, SN1987A exploded about 30 years ago, the closest supernova being studied in the telescope era. Actually, the main goal we had when repeating this target was to try to capture -successfully- its remains. In this image, we can see two very small blobs that undoubtedly belong to SN1987A. It can be seen below, a cropped image of it as well as the Hubble image that confirms that these two blobs are the nodes where the two circular arcs overlap, when comparing the star field. There are many more interesting objects in the field of this image (see annotated image below). Two more cropped sections including Brey 55 (an Oxygen-rich nebula) and the so-called Honeycomb can be seen below.

The images of this object have been taken with narrowband filters (Ha and OIII) as well as with short exposures with RGB filters for the stars. Even if the red Hydrogen emission is very strong and clearly dominates the broadband RGB images, when imaging with narrowband filters, the Oxygen emission shows up an intense signal. We have tried to balance both signals to their captured intensities when processing this image.