This bright small object is located 6800 light years away in the constellation of Vela at a southern declination of -43 degrees. It is a magnitude 12 object which spans 3 arc-minutes in our apparent view. This corresponds to a diameter of 6 light years.
Although this object was identified as part of the Kohoutek planetary nebulae catalog, and is still recognized by the K 2-15 designation, it has since been identified as a HII region, not a PN. The fact that it is a HII region is clear from 4 aspects of my image: its size, the solid bright HII signal, the winding dust lanes, and the lack of a progenitor star.
This object lies between Gum 17 and Gum 18, within the large Vela SNR boundary and just west of the SNR feature nicknamed the Spiral Flame.
The Kohoutek catalog contains objects discovered by the Czech astronomer Dr. Luboš Kohoutek. My collection of Kohoutek objects is
here.
For this object, I used the subs from one of the mosaic images taken recently for
my Vela SNR image, taken with my RASA setup. I would like to image this object again next season using my smaller scale C11 EdgeHD setup to try to capture more detail.
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