Rick,

I have imaged NGC 2022 several times but did not even know that there is an
outer shell....
Maybe I'll try some longer exposures next winter.

Stefan


"WA0CKY" schrieb im Newsbeitrag ...


NGC 2022 is a multi-shell planetary nebula just east of Orion's head.
The Hubble Space Telescope page says it is 5000 light-years distant. I
found no other distance estimate for it. I knew it had an inner oval
that has some detail but poor seeing this night didn't let it show in my
image. Most images show a rather faint outer halo that turned out
rather bright cyan in my image. I'm not sure why as most show it more
neutral in color. What I didn't expect was hints of a faint shell
further out that is separated from the inner shells by a dark space.
This is all right at the noise level of my image. Taken under my
typical for this year, poor transparency, and with not enough frames it
is pretty much lost in the noise. In fact much of what I show may be
noise but I'm quite sure there is something there. I see hints of it in
several on line images. Seems no one gives this one the time needed to
bring it out.

There is a star embedded in the inner ring that even the Hubble image
doesn't seem able to separate out. I could but then I lost the ring so
gave up and left it as most show it, lost in the ring itself. The
Hubble image is all over the net. The original is at:
https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/opo9738c9/ (Link is messed up in
my browser cut and paste it seems the only way to make it work). It is
pseudo color using just a V filter (green) and a near IR filter to
supply color. I assume the green filter was assigned blue and the IR
filter red with a green made from an average of the two. The image has
south at the top rather than north as my image is oriented. The star is
barely visible (mainly its diffraction spikes) in the upper left corner
of the bright ring. Interestingly the ring has its own bright area
almost exactly opposite the star. It appears the ring also has its own
bright area right where the star is located making it hard to tell if
real or not. I vote for a symmetry here and both "corners" being
brighter than the rest of the ring.

I found nothing else with distance data in the image and no asteroids
showed up so no annotated image was prepared.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Rick


--
WA0CKY