Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Hercules (Her)  ·  Contains:  PK047+42.1
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Abell 39, Kirby Collins
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Abell 39

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Abell 39, Kirby Collins
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Abell 39

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Description

When stars like our sun reach the end of their lives, they shed their outer layers while the core contracts to a white dwarf.  The expelled gases form one or more concentric shells which may be ionized by the remaining star, forming an emission nebula referred to as a planetary nebula.  This is a misnomer...Herschel coined the term because they appeared disk-like, but they actually have nothing to do with planets.  

At magnitude 12, and glowing almost entirely with the blue-green of ionized oxygen, Abell 39 was too faint to be spied by Herschel or any of his contemporaries.But with its almost perfectly spherical shape, undistorted by any nearby stars or gas clouds, it is a beautiful example of this class of objects.  The nebula is roughly 7000 light years from us, and at five light years in diameter it appears 2.8 arc minutes in diameter (one tenth the width of the full moon).

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Abell 39, Kirby Collins