OVERVIEW
] NEBULACarina Nebula is an in the constellation Carina, 8500 from Earth, shining at apparent magnitude 3.00 (). Other catalogues list it as C 92, η Car Nebula and NGC 3372. It was discovered in 1752.
One of the largest star-forming regions known, containing the unstable hypergiant Eta Carinae, which nearly destroyed itself in an 1843 eruption and still might.
- WHAT IT IS
- H II region
- HOW FAR
- 8500
- HOW BIG ON THE SKY
- 2.00
- HOW BRIGHT (B)
The light arriving now left it that long ago.
About 3.9 full Moons wide.
Bright enough for the naked eye, under a sky dark enough.
THE MODEL
] LIGHT ALONG THE RAYCALCULATED · NOT AN OBSERVATION · ANGULAR SIZE AT THE CATALOGUED DISTANCE · H II REGION · MAJOR AXIS 120′ · NO SURFACE — DRAWN AS A VOLUME
A cloud of gas glowing at the lines its class emits, brightest in the middle and fading through the colour of the outer gas. The shape of it is the catalogued class; the flattening is the catalogued axis ratio read as the object's own shape rather than as a tilt, because this is not a disc and its ellipticity is not an inclination. Nothing measured the depth, so what is drawn is the roundest object that matches the ellipse the catalogue holds. The colours are the emission lines themselves, through the same colour-matching functions the star colours use. Drag it, or use the arrow keys, to look from another direction. The stars behind are the 498,631 this catalogue holds real distances for, drawn from where the camera actually is — but every one of them is within 170 parsecs of the Sun and this object is much further out, so from here that whole neighbourhood is a knot in one direction and the rest of the sky is empty. The view you land on looks the other way; turn back towards the Sun and the stars come with it. What the readout says is which of the two the frame is pointed at. The emptiness is not a missing backdrop — it is the edge of what this catalogue has measured.
IMAGES
] 4 FRAMES- Harel Boren
CC BY-SA 4.0 - ESO
CC BY 4.0 - Giuseppe Donatiello
CC0 - NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley), and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA); credit for CTIO Image: N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley) and NOAO/AURA/NSF
Public domain
OBSERVING
] FROM WHERE YOU AREWhat it takes to see Carina Nebula for yourself. Everything in this part of the page is worked out for a real horizon, a real night and the equipment you say you have.
Say where you are, and this line says when Carina Nebula is worth going out for.
THROUGH AN EYEPIECE
] 150 MM TELESCOPE · 25 MM EYEPIECEBright enough to pick out with your eyes alone, and from a lit street as well as a dark one. Carina Nebula covers 2.00° of sky against a of 1.08°, so at 48× it is wider than the field — sweep across it.
- 48×
- 1.08
- 1.25
- 13.0
- SIZE ON THE SKY
- 2.00
- FILLS OF THE FIELD
- more than 100% of the width
- APPARENT MAGNITUDE ()
- 3.00 · within reach
Carina Nebula is not a point of light, so the limit above is the wrong one to hold it against: the same brightness spread over 2.00° of sky is harder than a star of it, and goes first. Catalogued sizes are measured to a photographic contour, and the part an eye sees is usually smaller.
APPARENT PLACE
] EQUINOX J2026.7Where a telescope has to be pointed today, which is not quite where the catalogue records the object: the coordinate grid itself has turned since the year 2000 the catalogue is referred to.
- RIGHT ASCENSION
- DECLINATION
- GRID TURNED SINCE
- 11.5
- PROPER MOTION SINCE
- none published
Computed for 2026-09-07 00:00 UT. No proper motion is published for Carina Nebula, so nothing here moves the object; what separates this from the catalogued position above is the coordinate grid turning under it — about fifty arcseconds a year of precession since 2000, and the small nodding of the Earth’s axis on top of that. Aberration and refraction are not included, and neither is parallax; each is under an arcminute, which is also about as well as the catalogued position is known. The same figure for any date.
CATALOG DATA
] 8 FIELDSThe raw catalogue values, as the source published them, with the error bars where one was published — sorted by what each set of figures is about rather than by the order they happened to be stored in.
HOW BRIGHT IT IS
What the light adds up to, measured through one filter at a time. A magnitude is a brightness on a backwards scale — the smaller the number, the brighter the object.
- Apparent magnitude ()
WHERE IT IS AND HOW IT MOVES
Position, motion across the sky and the size it covers on it. These are measurements of the object as seen from here, so every one of them depends on where here is.
- Major axis
- 120
- Minor axis
- 120
WHEN IT WAS FOUND
Who first saw it, from where, and by what method.
- Discovered by
- Nicolas Louis de Lacaille
OTHER NAMES AND NUMBERS
The identifiers other catalogues file this object under, for anyone joining this data to theirs.
- Also known as
- Eta Carina Nebula, Great Nebula in Carina
- OpenNGC type code
- HII
- Wikidata item
- Q50042
- Wikipedia article
- Carina Nebula
ALSO KNOWN AS
] 4 DESIGNATIONS- Caldwell C 92
- Common name Carina Nebula
- Common name η Car Nebula
- NGC NGC 3372
LOOK IT UP ELSEWHERE
] 3 SERVICESEach link carries the identifier printed beside it. Nothing on this page is a measurement of our own, so a number that disagrees with one of these is worth reporting — and a service that has never catalogued this object under this name will say so plainly.
- SIMBADNGC 3372
Cross-identifications, measured values and the reference behind each of them.
- ADSobject:"NGC 3372"
Papers indexed against this object rather than against the string, newest first.
- VizieR600″ around 161.2855 -59.8667
Every published table with a row at this position, searched by coordinates rather than by name.
CITE THIS PAGE
] DR1This page is live and its numbers move when an upstream refreshes, so the citation names the release the rows belong to rather than the day you read them. The release itself is frozen, republished as a bundle, and is what a data-availability statement should point at.
SpaceCatalog. Carina Nebula [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/ngc-3372
@misc{spacecatalog_ngc-3372,
author = {{SpaceCatalog}},
title = {{Carina Nebula}},
howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
year = {2026},
url = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/ngc-3372},
note = {Catalogue entry, data release DR1 (2026-08-21). Values from OpenNGC.}
}The values above were taken from OpenNGC — CC-BY-SA-4.0. Citing this page does not replace citing that catalogue, and its licence is share-alike: the terms reach whatever you build from these rows.
RECENT ACTIVITY
] 3 ITEMS- Webb Opens Treasure Chest2026-08-21 · NASA · MISSION UPDATE
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NASA · ESA · UPDATED DAILY