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its discovery was only announced on Nov 4 of this
year. This is the largest Planetary Nebula known in the sky.
I guess because it has such very low surface
brightness it had never been discoved until very recently.
I imaged the area on 10 Nov and 11Nov under pretty
lousy conditions: way too much moon and one night had very poor transparency due
to the dew and other junk in the air.
I have some flatfield issues arising from the "hot
spot" that would not flat field out very well. The bottom arc in my image is
surely vignetting artifacts from the poor flat fielding. However the arc to the
right of center around 2 to 4 oclock is what is of interest and it appears that
I have in fact captured it.
Note that the image in the paper is greatly reduced
and was shot from a 2.5meter scope: it will have very tiny stars as a result.
And since it is a continuum subtracted [OIII] image, its stars will be very
diminished. Bear that in mind when you try to correlate the image in the paper
to my image.
Still if you look at my accompanying presentation
PDF on page 6 you can actually start matching up stars and see the faint outline
of the tell-tale arc.
I've been in contact with Paul Hewett, the
discoverer and he is encouraged by the work so far. I plan to shoot more images
of the area as I outlined in my discussion section. It rises very late in the
morning and I cannot even see the portion of the sky where it is located until
just before 4am. We get twilight around 5:30 am so there's not much time each
day for me to get more data through my [OIII] filter.
here's the link to my webpage:
here's the link to the
writeup/discussion:
and here's the original paper announcing the
discovery:
The Dream Machine camera with its 24 x 24 micron
pixels and high quantum efficiency is a great advantage over my ST10XME for this
sort of task. I am using a Cust Sci 3nm FWHM [OIII] filter.
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