There seems little agreement on its size and distance. I've seen
reports of 10,400 light-years to 8,500 light-years for its distance and
200 light-years to 50 light-years for its diameter. It appears the
latter differences are due to how the edge of it is measured. Just the
star ball would give the smaller diameter, including further stars would
lead to a larger diameter. Since this one is located against the stars
of the Milky Way, how you define its "edge" is extremely difficult.
Still, the wide disagreement surprised me.

My image is rather poor. This object is located at about -24 degrees.
My seeing goes to pot about -15 degrees. I finally had an extremely
good night so gave it a try. At higher declinations stars were about 2"
of arc in size or smaller in some cases but down low it was about 3.25".
Far worse than I normally would process but likely the best I'll do
from this location.

I'd hoped to see the planetary but only its central star shows. The
nebula is lost in the large size of about 7" of the central star. It
just won't show at my latitude, too much atmosphere to distort the
image. It might show in an OIII image but I don't have that filter. It
contains no hydrogen so H alpha is useless on this planetary. It's also
strong in IR but my sensor has little IR sensitivity so that doesn't
help either.

Stars are rather elongated due to atmospheric refraction. This low I
really need to use a pseudo lum image made from the RGB frames aligned
to eliminate the chromatic refraction of our atmosphere this low. I did
do that for the RGB part of this image. This resulted in smaller stars
in the RGB image even though they were taken at 1.5" per pixel than I
had in the luminosity image at 1" per pixel. But I took too few and too
short RGB images to get a sufficient signal to noise ratio to use these
as a pseudo luminosity image. I may go that route if I ever get a good
enough night. Actually it would take nights as I can only image this
one for about 2 hours at best thanks to my Meridian Tree being in the
way. I have an hour or so on either side of the tree before it gets so
low seeing is really awful. If I could cut down the tree (that's
illegal) I'd have nearly 4 hours of image time a night not 2 and those
additional hours would be in the best seeing. Where are those beavers
anyway?

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=6x5', RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Rick
--
Correct domain name is arvig and it is net not com. Prefix is correct.
Third character is a zero rather than a capital "Oh".

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