This
Astrobin Debut Object is a planetary nebula is located 15,000 light years away in the constellation of Scutum at a declination of -10 degrees. It is a magnitude 14 PN which spans 18 arc-seconds in our apparent view, which is 25% smaller than the current size of Venus. This corresponds to a length of 1.5 light years.
This PN lies about 1.5 degrees southwest of the Messier star cluster M26.
This is a bipolar PN and we are looking at it from a side-on perspective. The two end lobes, upper right and lower left, are blown out.
The signal is dominated by Ha except in the central region, where the Ha and OIII signals are about equal.
Minkowski planetary nebulae are small, challenging, and difficult to see visually without the use of OIII or HII filters. Some of them are very interesting, while many are stellar-like or otherwise not as interesting. These PNs were discovered by German-American astronomer Dr. Rudolph Minkowski. My Minkowski PN collection is seen
here.
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