Bystander said:
I'm with you, Rob. I can't see any connection, either. I don't think they are pictures of the same nebula. I'm wondering about Gendler's designation.
I beg to differ. I think they are the same.
Here you can see the problem with different color balances. The Gerber-Hager image is more yellow
and more blue than Gendler's Hubble image. Gerber and Hager made a large part of the galaxy look yellow, but Gendler and Hubble only made a small part close to the nucleus look yellow. If you imagine that most of the "galactic body" in Gendler's image is actually yellow, rather than bluish as it looks here, then you can see that his picture probably shows the same galaxy as Gerber and Hager's image does.
Look at Gerber and Hager's image again. Look at the largest size of it. Turn it around, so that "up" becomes "down". Now you can see that the brightest part of the "yellow body" of the galaxy, the area around the nucleus, is above the thinnest-looking dust lane. This is the yellow nuclear area that we see above the most obvious dust lane in Gendler's image.
Look at the very dark dust lane that seems to rise from the leftmost part of the star-forming dust lane in Gendler's image. You can see that there is quite a lot of star formation in the dust lane that crosses the nuclear area, particularly where the darkest dust lane (the "rising" one) cuts the other dust lane in Gendler's image. Now look at the Gerber and Hager image again. You can see that there is a very bright, small oblong patch just where the dust lanes cross at a steep angle. This is undoubtedly the starforming area that we see so much more clearly in Gendler's image.
In the Gerber and Hager image, you can see that there is some star formation in "the opposite part of the starforming dust lane", the part of it that is farthest away from the "rising dark dust lane". And there is some star formation in exactly that place in Gendler's image, too.
To me there is no doubt that Gendler's image shows the same galaxy as Gerber and Hager's image.
Ann
I like the Carina Nebula too, although what I like best about it is the blue, blue cluster on the lower right. The cluster is the compact and massive NGC 3293, made up mostly by hot bright blue stars, although it contains and least one red supergiant too and one lesser red giant. Here is a closeup of NGC 3293, courtesy of Robert Gendler:
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