As Astronomy’s photo editor, I get some cool images pretty much on a daily basis. Monday, I opened my e-mail to find that one of the magazine’s long-time imagers, Keith Quattrocchi, in association with Matt Helm, has imaged a hitherto undesignated planetary nebula in the constellation Cygnus. And, it’s a cool one.
Helm first discovered the object after imaging an HII region (a cloud of glowing hydrogen) only 48' from the Crescent Nebula (NGC 6888), one of the most famous of all deep-sky objects. Then Quattrocchi set out to image it in color.
As I was writing this blog, Quattrocchi e-mailed me and added the following:
“This planetary nebula was an independent co-discovery. Dave Jurasevich, Superintendant of Mount Wilson Observatory in California found it first on July 6, 2008. Matt and I saw it July 17. Jurasevich has submitted his report to the IAU requesting an object designation for the planetary.”
Quattrocchi took twenty-one 20-minute images (7 hours) with his 16-inch RC Optical Systems Ritchey-Chrétien telescope through each of three filters: Hydrogen-alpha, Sulfur II, and Oxygen III. That’s a total exposure of 21 hours! The result is a beautiful spherical nebula embedded in a gaseous region.
Congratulations, Dave, Matt, and Keith. What a great catch!