Back in 2012 while drawing NGC 3603 I took a look at this fascinating nebula complex and I really liked it. But then I didn't have time to draw the extremely complex nebula that occupies a substantial area of the sky. I left it for the last few days in 2016 as well. So much so that I was afraid I would come home empty handed concerning this field. I drew a few star positions from the map in daylight. Then on our penultimate night I gathered my strength and sketched the star field by the telescope. At this point I only needed one more night. But on the last night clouds came and the sky was almost completely covered. A really stressful and hurried drewing session followed and I luckily managed to sketch this nebula having a lot of catalog numbers in the cloud holes.

The edges of the nebula disappear diffusely into the background. The many bright spots of the nebula are inhomogeneous. The drawing was made without a filter. The [OIII] filter increases the contrast of the patches except for one: NGC 3576 on the lower right which is almost erased from the sky by the filter. Examining the photo you can see the different color of NGC 3576: it contains almost no oxygen. Its light is probably largely given by hydrogen emission of which H-beta is detectable to the human eye.

Comparison with the photograph

You can see Iván Éder's photo of the entire RCW 57 nebula complex made with his 20 cm astrograph. The right part of this photo contains the area covered in my drawing, around NGC 3582. The photo was taken with narrow-band H-alpha, [OIII], SII filters. The color mapping during processing was similar to how the so-called Hubble-palette images of the Hubble Space Telescope were processed. Unlike many of my other drawings on this site I did not want to (and could not) depict my drawing in a similar crop to the photo. So I fitted my drawing to the photo depicting a much larger area. Of course keeping all the inaccuracies of the former. It is worth looking at the original photo of NGC 3576 - 3603 by Iván Éder. As is usually the case the camera reveals orders of magnitude more of the beauty of the area than the human eye. But I have no complaints here either. This area of ​​the sky is very rich and beautiful visually as well.