Starship Asterisk*

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap081219.html
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Is _The Bean nebula_ at the NW end of LMC:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0812/LM ... abels2.jpg
the same as _The Coffee Bean nebula_ (SFO 75, RCW 98 or Gum 49)?


Distance: 2800 pc, Size: 4.9 pc
http://www.starshadows.com/gallery/disp ... ?imgID=192

SFO 75 (RCW 98), the Coffee Bean Nebula, is a Bright Rimmed Cloud (BRC) from the Sugatani, Fukui, & Ogura catalog. It is a ring type nebula centered on a Wolf-Rayert star. Radio telescope observations reveal the presence of a dense core embedded within each cloud, and the presence of a layer of hot ionised gas coincided with their bright-rims. The ionised gas has electron densities significantly higher than the critical density above which an ionised boundary layer can form and be maintained, strongly supporting the hypothesis that these clouds are being photoionised by the nearby OB star(s). This radiation driven implosion promotes abundant star formation.
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The annotated view of the LMC has about a hundred labels. What could be messier? That's "messier", not "Messier" who was oblivious to the sights of the South.

This link from the APOD description itself contains links to several different size higher resolution views including the most detailed here. I recommend taking a look at the highest resolution version you can stand to download. The worst case is a 5 MB file (not so bad with broadband but 12 minutes with 56 kbps dial-up).

Looking at the enlarged detailed image, I might call the Coffe Bean nebula the Mickey Mouse nebuls if you look at the negative space within the red nebula.

http://en.wikipedia.org/

<<The first preserved mention of the Large Magellanic Cloud was by Persian astronomer Abd Al-Rahman Al Sufi, who in 964, in his Book of Fixed Stars, calls it Al Bakr, the White Ox of the southern Arabs, and points out that while invisible from Northern Arabia and Baghdad, this object is visible from the strait of Bab el Mandeb, at 12°15' Northern latitude.

European sailors may have first noticed the clouds during the Middle Ages when they were used for navigation. Portuguese and Dutch sailors called them the Cape Clouds, a name that was retained for several centuries.

The next recorded observation was in 1503-4 by Amerigo Vespucci in a letter about his third voyage. In this letter he mentions "three Canopes, two bright and one obscure”; the “bright” refers to the two Magellanic Clouds, and the "obscure" refers to the Coalsack.

During the circumnavigation of the Earth by Ferdinand Magellan in 1519–22, they were described by Antonio Pigafetta as dim clusters of stars.

In Johann Bayer's celestial atlas Uranometria, published in 1603, he named the smaller cloud, Nubecula Minor. In Latin, Nubecula means a little cloud.>>