Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cancer (Cnc)  ·  Contains:  IC 523  ·  PK219+31.1  ·  Sh2-290
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Abell 31, Roger Nichol
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Abell 31

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Abell 31, Roger Nichol
Powered byPixInsight

Abell 31

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Description

Abell 31, (SHO-290), a planetary nebula about 2000 light years away. The gases have expanded to around 10 lightyears in width since the demise of its progenitor star, likely to have been about 130,000 years ago.  This has made this one of the largest planetary nebulae that we can observe, but also caused it to dissipate, making it very faint.

20 hours on this with my setup is nowhere near enough so this is a work-in-progress to revisit next year.

I used the new Antlia ALP-T dual Ha/Oiii 5nm filter for most of this image, and combined with my earlier L-eXtreme images after stacking.  Stars are from L-Pro with short exposures.

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Abell 31, Roger Nichol