by Andrew Walsh (Curtin University)

Accurate positions of water masers made during HOPS, the H ₂ O southern Galactic Plane Survey. This image shows the position of just one water maser site from the catalogue of over 600 such sites identified with the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA), overlaid onto a 3-color GLIMPSE image ( 3.6 , 4.5 and 8 micron). The accurate positions allow us to see that the maser site is located right at the tip of a nebula that is being actively destroyed by the very luminous star found in the bottom-left corner of the GLIMPSE image. The inset shows the ATCA spectrum of water maser emission, with eleven components spanning a velocity range of over 100 km/s.

Reference: Walsh, Purcell, Longmore, Breen, Green, Harvey-Smith, Jordan, Macpherson 2014, MNRAS 442, 2240