Cosmic Basketball  - Planetary Nebula PuWe1 was discovered fairly recently, in 1980, while Austrian astronomers Alois Purgathofer and Ronald Weinberger were searching Palomar Observatory Sky Survey prints for possible flare stars. Covering 41 percent of the area of the Full Moon, it is the second-largest planetary nebula visible from Earth, surpassed only by the Helix Nebula (NGC 7293).   Researchers have measured PuWe1's brightness at magnitude 8.6 in Hα  and 11.2 in OIII.  Best estimates indicate that its progenitor white dwarf star has a visual magnitude of 15.5.

PuWe1 lies some 1,300 light-years away, making it one of the nearest of the approximately 1,500 planetary nebulae in the Milky Way. It has a true diameter of about 4 light-years.  Astronomers think that while the cloud of gas will continue to expand, its outer edge has pretty much reached the limit at which the radiation from the central star can still excite the atoms and cause them to glow.  (Astronomy Magazine 1/1/2024 https://www.astronomy.com/science/purgathofer-weinberger-1/).

Equipment and processing used: Celestron RASA-11 telescope with ZWO ASI294 MC Pro one shot color camera riding on an iOptron CEM120-EC2 mount.  N.I.N.A./PHD2 used for image acquisition.   This image combines 260 individual five minute exposures (21.7 hours of data), shot through an IDAS-NBZ dual band Hα/OIII filter.  Data captured in October, 2023 from our observatory in Mariposa, Ca.   Processed using PixInsight.  This image represents my first use of the GraXpert tool for gradient normalization.

In retrospect, I feel that I should have captured RGB data for the stars, to better represent their true colors.  Also, I had some difficulty dealing with color fringing in the stars.  Perhaps I will add some RGB data in a future revision.

Thanks to @Göran Nilsson for the inspiration to attempt this target.  His RASA image does a better job of capturing the faint nebulosity surrounding PuWe1😊.