Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cepheus (Cep)  ·  Contains:  PK107+07.1
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IsWe 2, Gary Imm
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IsWe 2

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
IsWe 2, Gary Imm
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IsWe 2

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Description

This object, IsWe 2 or IW 2, is an extremely faint ancient planetary nebula located 850 light years away in the constellation of Cepheus at a declination of +66 degrees. All PN are faint to some degree, but this one is extremely faint and is one of the faintest objects I have ever imaged. Perhaps that is why this object wasn't discovered until 1987, by Ishida and Weinberger.

This PN is large at 20 arc-minutes in our apparent view, with a diameter of 4 light years. It is one of the largest PN in true size and is almost twice the diameter of the large Helix Nebula (NGC 7293). This PN is suspected to be one of the oldest known PN, on the order of 50,000 years.

The PN is primarily comprised of reddish HII gas. A circular HII shape is seen centered slight above and left of center in this image. A horizontal concentrated band of HII is seen around the orange star, slightly left and below the center of the image. HII is also seen in the background as well, which makes it harder to distinguish the nebula from the background.

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