Pk 294-0.1

[Paulyman]

Okay, so all these cloudy nights and isolation has given me time to really play with the little data I do have. To that end I was playing with my "Heart of the Chicken" image, which is a crop of the center of IC2944 the Running Chicken Nebula, and I noticed something odd towards the lower left of the image. In my SHO image I chose from the outset to linear fit to the weakest channel, which I think has produced a nice result, but when I zoomed in on this weird "star" it just looked like a blue fuzzy sphere. I searched around and found a thread on Ice in Space (http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showthread.php?p=1365814) and discovered it was actually the planetary nebula PK 294-0.1! So I went back and had a look at my original Mure Denoised frames, there was definitely something there in Ha and Oiii but nothing in Sii. So I produced a HOO image this time linear fitted to the stronger Ha channel. Now given this is a 71mm refractor and has only 4 hours of data excluding the Sii channel I'm not getting anything to win awards but I'm happy to have found something that appears to be very rarely imaged!

Link to Astrobin version: https://astrob.in/qd2d6h/0/

[Ant0nio]

Nicely done Paul & well done for demystifying this obscure object. :thumbsup:
Cheers,
Tony

[Atmos]

I noticed the same thing when I shot this region this time last year! It's a pretty small little sucker but you've captured it well :)

[Paulyman]

Your thread is the only one I can find! Thankfully you lot in that thread did all the hard yards last year and worked out it’s catalog number. I’m sure there are more images out there, maybe there was some on Astrobin but were lost in the recent data loss?

[Paulyman]

I had some time booked on the 0.5m ASA T2 system at Chile Scope for another project but when I found this little gem I changed the planned session. Here is 4 hours of data in HOO, pretty much zero processing in PixInsight at this point other than DBE, and permanent STF. Looking forward to more data, it is a nice little gem.

[Atmos]

It's actually come out fairly closer to the pure RGB version I did ages ago which is a good sign :)
That is some serious aperture and dark skies to throw at it too!

[Paulyman]

Yeah I'm looking forward to getting at it with drizzle and deconvolution once I get more data. This might be one to give the data to the experts to have a go at once there is enough to make it worth while.