Holoea! (November 2017)

This is the western half of the open cluster M36.  Please find the curious object that looks like a comet with an upward sweeping tail.  Look at about 6:30, halfway from center to lower left edge.  This is Holoea.  The three different versions of the image highlight different parts of this faint object.  After you have found Holoea, please see the write-up below.

Holoea means "flowing gas."  This object was discovered in 1995.  No one is certain just what it is, yet.  Spectroscopy and radio interferometer observations suggest that the object involves a K2 star, two young stellar objects (YSOs) that are moving toward star status, and one pre-stellar condensation of gas that is beginning to glow. Just how those objects are together in the sky is not clear yet, but something, probably one of the YSOs, is ejecting gas outward at 650 kilometers per second!  The system is considered a valuable information source for the stage of star formation between (i) condensing gas cloud and (ii) the point at which a YSO no longer accretes gas.

This image is 17x720" with the SXVF-H9C and Astronomik CLS filter through the CFF 290 Classical Cassegrain at f/8.1.  I thought I might make a color image, but the object is so faint that color would not have been pretty.

Reports are that Holoea has grown brighter, and perhaps it has since the 1950s, but my full-visual-spectrum image suggests it is around magnitude 18.5, something close to the measurement taken in the 1990s.  The faintest stars in the image are around magnitude 20.

My report relies on 2 Jeff Kanipe & Dennis Webb, Annals of the Deep Sky 156 (Willmann-Bell 2015); O. Morata, Y.-J. Kuan, P.T.P. Ho, H.-C. Huang, E.A. Magnier, and R. Zhao-Geisler, Millimetric and Submillimetric Observations of IRAS 05327+3404 "Holoea" in M36, 146 The Astronomical Journal 1 (2013), at http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-6256/146/3/49/pdf ; and Magnier's original paper (1996) for the magnitude measured in the 1990s.  I learned of Holoea from Kanipe and Webb.