A newly discovered planetary nebula in Sagittarius
Hi.
Astroron (Ron) sent me a pm with co ords of a newly discovered planetary nebula at the following location
19 37 43.77 -13 51 20, size is approx.
0.7'x0.45'
Earlier this evening I imaged it with my 10 inch f5.6 newtonian and modded 350D camera. UHCS and UV IR filters, MPCC coma corrector
Seeing quite good, scope was tracking quite well too. Off axis hand guided as usual. Moonlit skies
This is my first image of a "new" planetary nebula Possibly the first true colour image of this object ever taken?
Scott
We were discussing about this PN at the beginning of the month. It would be interesting to see if there's been any other amateurs (apart from yourself and a couple of others) who have managed to image this thing. They're good images, Scott. I imagine it wasn't an easy target!!!.
Many thanks. I wasnt sure what to expect, thankfully there was a few bright stas I could see in the viewfinder to show I was on target. A 20 second test image to check focus just revealed it when the laptop bright ness was turned up, so I knew it was dooable. A darker free of moonlit sky might show it better, but at the same time the seeing here was above average when i took the image run.
It looks definately like an oxygen line emitter, very little HA in it, mainly blue. That probably explains why it can be seen visually in a suitable scope. Dont think my 10 would be big enough though!
It's only young by the looks of it. You can barely see the central star even in a fairly large scope and in UV on the DSS images, there's a definite central energy source present. It's probably the PN central star, so it's radiating mostly in the high UV region. That's a surface temp of around 200000K....it's probably giving off bugger all visible light!!!!
incredible to think an amatuer can image something only recently discovered from their backyard with a moderate sized scope. What next .... one of your own discoverys perhaps.
Thanks all.
I reprocessed it using drizzle 2x upscale in Iris. The central star may just possibly be visible near bottom of object as a faint fuzzy spot, or it could be just a bright knot of nebulosity.
Scott
Here's two images I knocked up via Aladin....DSS images IR(R), Red(G) and Blue(B), just for comparison. The other image is a greyscale version of the first. Makes things a little easier to see. You can see the PN in the centre of the image. The bright object that appears to be the central star is in fact a foreground object. The central star is appears to be invisible at visual wavelengths. As Scott mentioned in his posts, most of the light coming from this object is in the blue part of the spectrum. If you look closely, you may see that the neb' appears to have a slightly bipolar character.
Great idia
I had a go at that too. because the blue plate is a smaller scale I upscaled it 2x before using Iris to resize/align the IR, Red and blue plates, then used Iris RGB function to make up the colour image. I upscaled it again for a closer look.
When I looket at the IR plate there is no sign of the nebula at all.
Scott
That's right, basically no IR emissions. This guy is a pure line emitter on OIII. If you look closely at your image, you may see something right near the centre of the neb...that might be the central star, although I wouldn't say for sure. It's probably a clump of gas associated with the central star.
Nice work Scott, that is a superb image with a high degree of difficulty! Are the RA & DEC coordinates J2000 or Current, as I may try to grab this miniscule, faint fella with the ST7?
And, nice supporting information Carl, I enjoyed your investigation!
You may be interested in this observation report by Steve Gottlieb on Cloudy Nights Please note it is not my observation
It agrees with what Carl and others have noted.
Cheers
I observed this new planetary (listed as galaxy PGC 932285 in LEDA) with Dana Patchick a couple of weeks back (July 25th) at Lake Sonoma (SQM-L readings between 21.39-21.46 that evening) in my 18" f/4.3 Starmaster as well as Greg Laflamme's compact 22" f/3.7. Lake Sonoma is my "nearby" site, an 80-minute drive from Berkeley into the beautiful Sonoma county vineyards.
In my scope at 275x (unfiltered) it appeared as a small, hazy spot with a mag 14.5-15 star at or just off the SE end. The main glow was ~15" in diameter and had a very low surface brightness. The shape seemed slightly irregular or elongated, though it was really too faint to pin down a distinct outline. Occasionally an extremely faint superimposed star was seen.
This discovery can be found 6.3' NNW of mag 6.9 HD 185044 and forms a small triangle with two 14.5-magnitude stars 1.6' WNW and 2' N. There's a faint, very close double star just 1.5' SW of the planetary and I must admit we initially mistook this unresolved double for the planetary!
We also spent close to an hour observing the object in Greg's 22" at various magnitudes using a UHC and OIII filters. At 462x, the star off the SE end was cleanly resolved and the planetary displayed a moderate contrast gain using a UHC filter (easy to hold continuously). I felt the UHC filter gave a better contrast boost over the OIII, though perhaps at a lower magnification the OIII would have been more helpful. The overall size seemed roughly 20"x15".
The total magnitude is perhaps 15 and I'm guessing a 12-inch should pull in this object (or perhaps smaller in exceptional conditions). Hopefully others will take on the challenge.
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Steve Gottlieb
18" f/4.3 Starmaster
Adventures In Deep Space
7500+ NGC/IC Visual Descriptions
NGC/IC Project
I think a professional observatory needs to be informed about this. We need a good spectroscopic analysis done on the object. Unless someone here (Ken, Robin??) has a large enough scope with a spectrograph attached so we can get this ourselves. Also, a couple of good images taken with a large scope to get a better visual appraisal of this object wouldn't go astray either.
Possibly the first true colour image of this object ever taken?
