M1-92 Minkowski's Footprint (lowenthalm)

M1-92 Minkowski's Footprint

This is a tiny little Minkowski catalog proto-planetary called the Footprint Nebula, for obvious reasons. Its quite bright and fairly easy to find visually, but its so tiny that its hard to pick out from the stars, even in an image. A large aperture is required to visually reveal the oval shapes of the lobes. The seeing was pretty good the night I captured this, but my collimation was not quite dialed in - I think something was a little loose in a tube truss. I had to process it a bit to remove those artifacts, but ended up splitting the nebula from its progenitor star (that red spot between the lobes) quite nicely and showing the pointy ends of the lobes too. Someday this will bloom into a new dumbell nebula. It only needs to expand for a couple thousand more years!

Revision A shows the unannotated image with correct plate-solving to show its location and field dimensions and pixel scale. Revsion B is the same image with 2x and 4x magnified insets to better show the detail, since the features are difficulte to see at one-to-one screen pixel scale.

Original
Final
B

B

Description: Revision B has 2x and 4x magnifications of the nebula in insets. The original image scale is 0.5 arc/seconds per pixel.
Look at Revision A to see the plate-solved image details

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Astrophotography with Dobson

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Bests: Unusual objects
Planetary Nebula

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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
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The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

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Status	Basic failed
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	2479033
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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