Like a wallflower, 30 Doradus C at first glance may appear to be completely overshadowed by its ludicrously ostentatious neighbour! But like a wallflower, the closer you look the more intricately beautiful it becomes and in fact, its intriguing cavity holds some superb observing treasures. Lying a mere 16′ SW of the Tarantula’s core and measuring 100 pc x 90 pc, it was first identified and named by Le Marne in 1968, and in 1985 it was classified as a superbubble by Mathewson et al. using radio and optical emission line data. 30 Doradus C even has a place in the history of X-ray astronomy because it was observed in the first-light XMM-Newton observation (Dennerl et al. 2001).

16″ at 228x: The superbubble is powered by the OB association, LH 90 = NGC 2044 which contains several compact clusters and is particularly rich in Wolf-Rayet stars… such a treat for those of us who love these rare and enigmatic stars! With a diameter of 3′, LH 90 appears as a dozen or so resolved stars. It has a prominent E-W bar of three bright stars which is saturated with the glow of unresolved stars. The central star is beautifully white mag 12.4 blue supergiant SK -69 212. The other two oddly bloated “stars” are not only compact clusters, but they also form a binary cluster! The eastern one is BRHT 17a which contains 9+ components; the western one is BRHT 17b and it contains 15+ components, including an incredible five Wolf-Rayet stars! Smaller chains of faint stars spiral out to the north and south from the bar and a handful of other stars lie scattered around in a random fashion. A Wolf-Rayet star, mag 13.5 Brey 57, lies due north of BRHT 17b.

A crooked chain of stars runs N-S to the west of the bar, and it contains some interesting stars also set against the rich glow of unresolved stars: Mag 13.6 Wolf-Rayet star Brey 56 lies on its southern end, and mag 13.9 Bray 62 on its northern end. In the centre lies a dense clump that was at first considered a compact cluster until later research found its stars not to be coeval. It contains quite a hefty mix: two Wolf-Rayet stars – mag 14.2 Brey 58, mag 16.1 58a and a red supergiant mag 13.9 HD 269815. A small star almost attached to the clump is another compact cluster, KMK88 79. A fourth compact cluster, mag 11.5 KMK88 87, lies on the northern periphery of the cavity.

16″ at 228 + UHC Filter: Unlike some of the other superbubbles, 30 Dor C doesn’t have brilliant globs of bright H II regions surrounding its vast cavity. Rather, the southern half of its cavity is surrounded by curlicues of ghostly, glowing nebulosity that sprawl around it in an E-W fashion in an almost-oval-shape. They extend quite far south. The western curlicue is a beautiful arc of glowing nebulosity, the rest of the curlicues are of different proportions and seem to fade and come again in a fascinating fashion. They respond well to the UHC filter but if one tries to work one’s way along one in a bid to capture the next, the complex, fractured appearance of the vaporous curlicues makes it a vain attempt – although it certainly is a grand way to appreciate the sprawling superbubble. A small bright little droplet of nebulosity, BSDL 2579, lies at the east end of the nebulosity.

30 Doradus C also harbours a young supernova remnant – SNR J0536-6913 – which lies, invisible to our telescopes, in the superbubble’s southeastern quarter. There is a conspicuous dark cloud running NE-SW at the northern boundary of N157A, N157B and N157C and separating LH 90 from the associations LH 85 and 89 (out of the image at the top righthand side).