NGC 3576 - Statue of Liberty Nebula

From Sky and Telescope: NGC 3199 lies about 12,000 light-years away, a glowing cosmic cloud (emission nebula) in the southern constellation of Carina. The nebula is about 75 light-years across ..and more or less a complete ring shape, with one much brighter edge. ... Near the center of the ring is a Wolf-Rayet star, WR-18, a massive, hot, short-lived star that generates an intense stellar wind. In fact, Wolf-Rayet stars are known to create nebulae with interesting shapes as their powerful winds sweep up surrounding interstellar material .. in a bow shock produced as the star plowed through a uniform medium. But measurements have shown the star is not really moving directly toward the bright edge. So a more likely explanation is that the material surrounding the star is not uniform, but clumped and denser near the bright edge of windblown NGC 3199. [Edited from NASA APOD write-up from 2008 and Wikipedia]

Image Notes: This data is from a remote astrophotography service, TelescopeLive. Since it has been nearly 6 months since the weather has cooperated for deep sky imaging, I decided to try out this service to see what all the hubbub was about. I can see why these services have become popular. The data is fairly clean and imaging cost is fairly reasonable for existing data in particular.

In addition, I cannot see this object from where I live and will not be able to image it unless I travel with my gear essentially to the Southern Hemisphere. I have always enjoyed it from an observation perspective and it gives me a chance to process this on my own. Below are 2 versions of this image in SHO, one with star spikes and one without. I’ve been toying this year with including artifacts like that to see how they accent the image.