16″ at 228x: Star clouds are always lovely to observe with their beautiful shapes and each with their own unique assemblages of stars and clusters, and LH 45 is no exception. It appears as an 11′ cloud of stars, with eight mag 10-11 stars, a rich mass of mag 13-14 and fainter stars, the soft haze of unresolved stars, and with N43’s faint and patchy nebulosity lying across its northern end. The brightest stars are gathered in a ragged N-S arc that is open to the west and the arc is rich in smaller stars and the glow of unresolved stars.

It is anchored on its southern end by a pair of mag 10.5 stars, the most southern of which appears slightly orangey, and on its northern end by double star HD 271191 = RST 132: mag 11.1/11.4 at 0.9″. (It, along with mag 13.9 LHA 12-S 129, is one of N43’s ionizing stars). The association’s lucida, mag 9.6 yellow supergiant HD 271182, lies to the arc’s west. The cluster SL 415 lies in a small gathering of small stars to the east of the arc, and it appears fairly faint, ~10″ in diameter, round, with no resolution. To its north, one can see the mag 13.3 Wolf-Rayet star, Brey 24.

Without a filter N43, lying across the northern side of the star cloud, appears as a faint, irregular patch of nebulosity to the west and a fainter, round patch on the east side. The nebulosity has a good contrast gain with the UHC filter, and albeit faint and patchy, it displays an unusual ~7′ serpentine twist, oriented E-W. The nebulosity has no distinct edges, and just fades away into the dark sky. Mag 12.7 cluster SL 428 lies in the eastern patch, and unfiltered, it appears as a fairly bright, round glow of unresolved stars, ~30″ in diameter with a very small NNE-SSW streak of brighter unresolved stars on the west side.