Without a filter N159 is striking. With the UHC filter it is spectacular! At low magnification without a filter, it looks to my eye remarkably like a leopard’s pawprint; its softly glowing pads imprinted in the starry night. Gorgeous! At 130x the paw print transforms into a serpentine “S” shape surrounded by other glowing knots, with the entire complex enveloped in a faint but beautiful overall haze of nebulosity. The stars of LH 105 stud the rich nebulosity like carelessly strewn diamond chips. The filter reveals some incredible depth and structure in the nebulosity, with some sections appearing almost opulent in their depth and richness, others soft and silky, others misty. Gorgeous!

16″ at 228x: What a gorgeous sight it is to see stars strewn across rich nebulosity that even without a filter displays incredible gradations and depths of nebulosity. With all the rich nebulosity, one just knows that a lot of LH 105’s stars are embedded invisibly in the thick nebulosity, but even so a lovely scattering of stars of mixed magnitude glitter against their rich nebulous background.

16″ at 228x + UHC filter: This is the brightest section of this lovely complex. Detached from the rest of the complex, it appears extremely bright with a smooth, pearly, very high surface brightness. It has a narrow triangular shape, ~1′ in diameter, with its one vertex lying at its north end. It has crisp, well-defined edges. Without a filter, the ionizing star, mag 13.2 star, DD 13 (a pair of O-stars), is located at the centre of the glow.

16″ at 228x + UHC filter: N159C-east is the second brightest section of this remarkable complex. It appears very bright and dense; slightly elongated ~1.2′ x 1.0′ N-S and with an irregular shape. The edges are well-defined, except to the south where fainter nebulosity sweeps west ~1.5′ and then curves north and brightens into N159C-west, a softly glowing round patch, ~40″ in diameter, with lovely soft edges. Without the filter a mag 14.0 star lies close to the centre, and a couple of fainter stars are also involved.

16″ at 228x + UHC filter: N159D is the largest section of the complex and it appears bright, ~1.5′ in diameter, and just off-round in shape, elongated slightly NNE-SSW. Its bright, pearly glow is fairly even, and its edges nicely defined except for the western side where it merges with faint nebulosity with N159F = NGC 2078. Without the filter, bright mag 12.5 R149, an O8.5-type supergiant, lies near the centre, and a few mag 13.5 and fainter stars are involved in the periphery of the nebula. N159I appears as a small but brighter knot embedded within the glow on the west side. And N159B is buried somewhere on the eastern side of N159D, unidentifiable in the rich nebulosity.

N159-5, a beautiful blob butterfly. Credit: M. Heydari-Malayeri (Paris Observatory) and NASA/ESA

But most fascinating of all is a faint mag 15 “star” on the southeast side (~44″ SE of R149) that isn’t a star at all… it is the high excitation blob, N159-5, buried in the centre of the maelstrom of glowing gases and dark dust. It was the first high excitation blob to be discovered by Mohammad Heydari-Malayeri (1982), an astronomer at Paris Observatory. At the eyepiece it is simply a faint stellar point of light, but it is known as the “Papillon Nebula” from its gorgeous 1998 Hubble image which revealed it to be a “papillon” or butterfly-shaped ionized nebula with the “wings” separated by ~0.6 pc. The blob is less than 2 light-years in size. 

16″ at 228x + UHC filter: Lying ~1.5′ to the south of the curving N159C, this emission object appears as a fairly faint, irregularly round patch, 35″ in diameter. It has a smooth, even glow and nicely defined edges. Without a filter an extremely small and faint star is involved with the nebulosity.

16″ at 228x + UHC filter: N159F appears as a fairly bright glow, elongated E-W ~1.2’x0.8′. It is brightest on the southern end and fades to a fainter glow on the northern end. It is encased in a beautifully soft glow of nebulosity that extends ~1.2′ to the north. The southern side has nice edges, but the other edges are ill-defined and simply melt away and on its eastern side it fades to very faint nebulosity that merges with N159D = NGC 2083. Without a filter, two mag 14/14.5 stars are resolved on the north end, and the bright mag 12.1 blue supergiant R148 is involved on the south side. Fascinatingly, R148 forms a 6″ pair with the optical counterpart of LMC X-1, a High-Mass X-ray binary system consisting of an accreting 10 solar-mass black hole and its bright companion, the massive O-type star LMC X-1 32 (mag 14.5). Now, that’s not something one sees most nights! (And as an aside, LMC X-1 is strongest X-ray source in the Large Magellanic Cloud.)

16″ at 228x + UHC filter: Lying 1.1′ ENE of NGC 2084, this detached emission object appears as a fairly bright, N-S elongated oval glow, ~45″ in diameter. It appears misty and uneven, and its edges are indistinct and melt away. Without the filter, a very faint star lies almost dead centre.

16″ at 228x + UHC filter: I couldn’t pick up these three small emission objects that lie detached on the western side.