This is a tiny planetary in Centaurus about 10,000 light years away. The bright central oval is quite small at about 50 arc sec in diameter, while the two red jets extend out to nearly 5 arc min across. There is thought to be a rare pair of binary white dwarf stars at the centre of the nebula.
Seeing wasn't crash hot (decent steady skies seem to be rather elusive of late) and the skies were only really cloud free for one out of the three nights it took to collect the nearly 13hrs of data, with lots of high cloud around Canberra lately
the detail is fantastic Mr Strongperson, and by the looks of the posting time you had a good night. love the comparison - certainly a world class effort
Fantastic little planetary Mike! The comparison just shows what depth can be achieved with very modest equipment when compared against the light bucket of the VLT.
I tried this one once but only captured the central part. I was hoping someone like you would do this one. I haven't seen any other amateur images of this.
Cheers guys, glad it was of interest The two red antennae make it I recon and set it apart from most other disc like planetary nebs and hence why I decided to devote 3 nights to this tiny little bugger I got 90min of Lum too that I was intending to use to bring out some background details but the seeing was quite poor and it didn't add anything and actually degraded the image slightly, so I left it out. We all lament our less than ideal seeing at times but with such small objects it is super critical...in the end we use what we are given
The two red antennae make it I recon and set it apart from most other disc like planetary nebs and hence why I decided to devote 3 nights to this tiny little bugger 
but with such small objects it is super critical...in the end we use what we are given 
