ASTRO: Planetary Nebula Abel 53

Abell 53/PK 40-0.1 is a one half minute in diameter nice red ring
planetary nebula in Aquila. I found several papers giving distances to
this nebula. Some were behind pay walls, including the newest. So I'm
stuck with older papers about 10 years old saying a distance of about
5500 light-years with a rather large range. Using the 5500 figure it
would be about 0.8 light-years across. The central star is only about
magnitude 20.8 or 20.9 depending on the source. Other than this I'm not
able to find much on this nebula or the field for that matter. It is in
the dark rift that passes through Aquila so everything is
obscured that lies beyond the dust.

Full image at 1" per pixel, crop at 0.8" per pixel.

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

Rick
--
Prefix is correct. Domain is arvig dot net

Beautiful little ring. And all dressed in red ;-)
At +6 degrees it might_just_ be high enough for my local horizon...

Stefan


"Rick Johnson" schrieb im Newsbeitrag
...

Abell 53/PK 40-0.1 is a one half minute in diameter nice red ring
planetary nebula in Aquila. I found several papers giving distances to
this nebula. Some were behind pay walls, including the newest. So I'm
stuck with older papers about 10 years old saying a distance of about
5500 light-years with a rather large range. Using the 5500 figure it
would be about 0.8 light-years across. The central star is only about
magnitude 20.8 or 20.9 depending on the source. Other than this I'm not
able to find much on this nebula or the field for that matter. It is in
the dark rift that passes through Aquila so everything is
obscured that lies beyond the dust.

Full image at 1" per pixel, crop at 0.8" per pixel.

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

Rick
--
Prefix is correct. Domain is arvig dot net