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NGC 3199
Gum 28, RCW 48, ESO127-EN014
RA 10:17:24
Dec -57° 55.3'
Bright
nebula |
Discovered by Sir John Herschel at the Cape of
Good Hope with an 18-inch f/13 speculum telescope. He recorded it as "A
very large and very remarkable nebula, which is brighter to the S.f. part, and
dies off to the N.p., having a curved form and forked tail. In the head of it is
a double star. The nebula is pretty bright, very large, figure irregular, 8'
long, 4' broad. Among a vast number of milky way stars." On a second
occassion he called it "very bright, very large, 10' long, of a concave or
crescent form, sharply terminated inwards, fading away outwards. In a field of
about 80 stars. The place is that of a 13th mag star, about the middle of the
crescent, or rather nearer the head." His next description reads: "pretty
bright, very gradually brighter in the middle, of a falcated or smilunar shape,
extending over three-quarters of the field. The place is that of a double star
in its vertex or southern extremity." His final observation was recorded as
"Place that of the double star near the cusp of the great falcated nebula,
whose extent in PD is = 1.3 radius of field = 9.75' In a rich field. A
clustering group follows."
Hartung calls it a "remarkable gaseous
nebula; it is a large diffuse fairly bright broad crescent about 7' x 3', convex
S.p. and well defined N.f. by a dark bay, with many stars involved. The field is
beautiful, sown with small pairs and triplets in a striking manner. A 6-inch
shows the form of the nebula faintly but definitely."
Gerd Bahr-Vollrath (Noosa Heads, Queensland,
Australia) observing with an 8-inch f/12 SCT, writes in the The Webb Society
Nebulae and Clusters Section Report No. 10, July 1992: "Quite large and
bright object. Appears like a mottled, inverted comma. Responds well to UHC
filter."
Colin S. Gum, in A Survey of Southern H II
Regions published in the RAS Memoirs, Vol. LXVII, identifies his No. 28 with NGC
3199. Gum's Notes for this object read: "Half a ring of nebulosity with HD
89358 [mag 11.1] at the centre of curvature. Possibly associated with the Carina
complex of nebulosities, although the modulus derived from average values would
place it at a much greater distance that the Eta Carinae complex." He gives
the size of the nebula as 12', and the intensity, or "visibility in the
particular section of the Milky Way in which the object occurs" is rated as
"moderately bright" on a scale of vf - f - mb - b - vb. In his scheme
of classifying the large-scale structural features of nebulae, the nebula is
rated a "IV", which corresponds to "fainter objects in which the
emission is concentrated in a ring or in a incomplete ring." He notes that
it corresponds to No. 107 in Sven Cederblad's 1946 catalogue. The catalogue of
Rodgers, Campbell and Whiteoak list it as No. 48, giving it a size of 15' x 10'
and calling it a "bright crescent shape." |
