I captured over an hour of data on this planetary nebula, thinking that would be enough to capture the outer fainter details adequately. Unfortunately, now that I have stacked the data, I find it wasn't quite enough. There may have been some transparency issues that night, but it was also warm, so I could only cool my camera sensor down to -10C, rather than my usual target sensor temperature of -15C. The resulting additional sensor noise probably didn't help either. There is some good detail in the center of the nebula though, owing to the pretty good seeing that evening. Maybe the rain and clouds will depart for a night or two in the coming weeks and allow me to capture some additional data with a light pollution filter and a sensor temperature of -15C.

I spent some time trying to find the distance and thus the actual size of this nebula, but found the available data not too reliable. There is an estimate in SIMBAD of 2232 parsecs, but this seems to only be based on models of overall brightness of planetary nebula. Using this distance estimate and the objects size of about 1 arc minute, the nebula would be around a reasonable size of 2 light years across. However, this estimate could easily be too distant by a factor of two, making the nebula twice as close and half as large. Gaia parallax data could usually be used to get a clear idea of the distance to the central progenitor star of the nebula and thus the nebula's distance. Unfortunately, the Gaia parallax data for the star is negative, which indicates an inconclusive measurement, probably due to a yellow star visible in PANSTARR survey imagery that is exceptionally close to the progenitor star. This star also appears to contaminate the B, V and G filter Gaia magnitude data making it impossible to even estimate the temperature (and thus brightness) of the progenitor star!

Each of the 8 subs stacked to produce this image were themselves live-stacks of 320 x 1.5 second exposures, live-stacked in SharpCap.