N185 nebula is a nearly circular 6.7 arcminute super bubble in the northwest portion of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) 170,000 light years distant in the southern constellation of Mensa. It is similar to the N70 super bubble (see my image of N70 here). This image is 35.5′ x 35.5′. North is up and east is left. It uses 11.25 hours of exposures with the nebular detail and filamentary structure brought out by hydrogen (H-a) and oxygen (OIII) narrowband filters.

Lasker (Ast. J., 212, 390-395, 1977) pointed to strong sulfur (SII) emission similar in magnitude to H-a. He concluded that these LMC objects, like N70, are likely to be radiatively ionized nebula. He indicated that it is difficult to determine if these objects are the result of supernova explosions or supersonic flow of stellar winds. More recently, Zhang et al. (Ast. J., 792, 58-67, 2014) conclude that N185 is energized by a recent supernova. Its expansion velocity of nearly 200 km/s and X-ray luminosity are similar to many known supernova remnants in the LMC.

Other objects in the field are annotated below.