Dear astro friends,

It is with great pleasure that we officially announce our second discovery, Coppe 2!

During a research session in 2022 in different official surveys, we came across a particular signal, which caught our attention.As this signal was initially difficult to interpret, we sought the valuable advice of our friend Marcel Drechsler, who managed to extract a clear signal from the IPHAS survey.
Then, our other friend Matthieu Tequi began photographing this region of the sky shortly after, making it possible to definitively confirm the signal and the existence of an unidentified object at these coordinates. Thank you Matthieu and Marcel for that!

IPHAS H-Alpha 



Cop2 by Matthieu Tequi (@astromat89)


All these elements, once collected, were sent to Pascal Ledu for analysis and perhaps, the official registration of the object. How excited we were to read positive feedback from him some time later! We learned there that our spotted signal is a new discovery of a candidate planetary nebula, called Cop 2, and recorded on the Planetary Nebulae site (here's the link: https://planetarynebulae.net/EN/page_np.php?id=1089).
Finally, after complete analysis by Quentin Parker, it was recorded in the official HASH database, located in Hong Kong, immediately under the status of “Likely PN” which we are delighted about! Thank you Pascal and Quentin for taking care of your scientific expertise!

The last step was to photograph this new object in order to obtain a first official image. To do this, we were able to count on our faithful Peter Goodhew (@PeterGoodhew), who took charge of shooting this target, with his equipment located in Spain under better skies than ours. Thank you so much Peter for this incredible work!
In the field of view, we were able to achieve direct proximity with another object, which also turns out to be a recent amateur discovery: Ou 3, discovered by Nicolas Outters! Ou 3 is a planetary nebula (PN) confirmed by spectrography, and quite typical with its bubble-shaped structure around its white dwarf, remnant of the star which exploded in the center (not visible in the final result). Right next to it is another small object: PNG 059.3+01.0.


Ou 3 discovered by Nicolas Outters


We decided to call Cop 2 the "Trilobite Nebula", because of its resemblance to this extinct animal which abundantly populated the Earth a long time ago, only to end up disappearing during the mass extinction at the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago.


Trilobite variety - Wikipedia


A first version of this image was proposed a few months ago by Peter (https://www.astrobin.com/y0rvpj/C/). The final image presented here was processed by us to make it official. We also put together an animation to reveal the different layers that make up this result (the quality is reduced enough to achieve a light file). This long delay between the moment of shooting and the final processing is largely due to my work, so we are very happy to finally be able to share this great news.


Cop 2 - Gif animation


Hope you will like it!

Clear skies,


Renaud & Olivier