This is a portion of
a wide field image of the Heart and Soul area taken in September 2023.
In the North-West direction the Fish Head Nebula (bottom-left of our image) I noticed this faint spheroidal and filamentary structure, that I later discovered being a well known supernova remnant. It is an object not-so-frequently imaged, therefore I thought it was worth to share it as individually.
SNR G132.6+01.5 - HBH3 (HB3) - LBN641The Supernova Remnant SNR G132.6+01.5 corresponds to the radio source HBH 3, after the numbering given by HANBURY BROWN R. and HAZARD C. in their article
"A survey of 23 localized radio sources in the Northern hemisphere" in Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc., 113, 123-133 (1953). It is also present in the LBN catalog with the number 641.
In the radio spectrum is one of the largest Milky Way SNR, and its age is estimated to be among 30 and 70 ky. Its distance has been estimated to be 2kpc, similar to the adjacent Hearth Nebula. One interesting and recent (2022) article covering it is
"Deep optical study of the mixed-morphology supernova remnant G 132.71.3 (HB3)" by P. Boumis et alii.
PN G132.8+02.0Thanks to a
rare image taken by
@Peter Goodhew, I learnt that an incredibly tiny planetary nebula is hidden in this image: the PN G132.8+02.0.
What appears to be, even at a close inspection, a star halo, is in reality our PN, partially obfuscated by the star. Consider that this image has been taken with a 135 mm focal and we are seeing here an object whose diameter is 0.5 arcseconds!
Picture 1: the miniature Planetary Nebula PN G132.8+02.0 as appears in our image
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