Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Monoceros (Mon)
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A ghost hiding in Monoceros, Planetary Nebula FR 2-25, Jon Talbot
A ghost hiding in Monoceros, Planetary Nebula FR 2-25
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A ghost hiding in Monoceros, Planetary Nebula FR 2-25

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
A ghost hiding in Monoceros, Planetary Nebula FR 2-25, Jon Talbot
A ghost hiding in Monoceros, Planetary Nebula FR 2-25
Powered byPixInsight

A ghost hiding in Monoceros, Planetary Nebula FR 2-25

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Description

While this image is not of a bright flashy object, it offers a view of an extremely faint object called FR 2-25. FR 2-25, also known as AlvKn1 is an ancient and very faint planetary nebula discovered by Astronomer David Frew in 2008 and Amateur Astronomers Filipe Alves and Mattias Kronberger in 2012. It displays a prominent bow shock that is the result of its interaction with the interstellar medium (ISM). It is near 20 arc minutes in diameter and emits mostly in Ha and OIII light. Its reported distance is .87 Kpc or roughly 2838 light years. The position is RA: 08 04 28 DEC: -06 34 51. The blue central star is magnitude 16 and is offset from the center of mass of the HII and OIII emission (See annotated image on my web link). I wonder if this is the real central star due to its position compared to the bow shock. I suppose time will tell. There are also many faint PGC galaxies in the field. The annotated image shows where these galaxies are and a hash mark over the reported central star. There is also some faint HII emission up and to the right of the main object, seen as red in the color image.

The above image is a crop of a larger field of view. The link to my web page also has inverted and highly stretched Ha and OIII images showing how faint this object is. The images were taken at 2x2 binning with a 152mm Stellarvue refractor resulting in a resolution of 1.28 arc sec/pixel. It combines 11.6hrs of OIII, 11 hrs of Ha and under an hour of RGB images for star color. Imaging began on 23 Feb 21 and ended on 11 April 2020.

The only other amateur or pro/am color image I know of, and could find on-line, was from the .8m Chilean Advanced Robotic Telescope, http://www.chart32.de/component/k2/objects/planetaty-nebulae/fr-2-25-planetary-nebula.

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A ghost hiding in Monoceros, Planetary Nebula FR 2-25, Jon Talbot