NGC 1360 (Gary Imm)

NGC 1360

This magnitude 11 planetary nebula, also known as Minkowski 1-3, is located 1300 light years away in the southern constellation of Fornax at a declination of -26 degrees. Its nickname is the Robin’s Egg nebula.

The nebula spans a large 9 arc-minutes in our apparent view. This corresponds to a actual diameter of 3 light years. The PN is larger in actual size than normal, likely indicating that this is an older ("Ancient") PN. It is much larger in apparent size than normal, simply because it is one of the closest PN to us.

The nebula is dominated by OIII throughout leading to its overall bluish color. HII is stronger in the central part of the nebula, resulting in a slight red tint, as well as in the 2 top and bottom ansae (knots), which are also seen as red.

I find the look and shape of this object to be unique amongst the 230 planetary nebulae I have imaged. It has a diffuse oblong appearance with few distinct features – no bright rim, inner boundary or central cavity. Dark winding void areas are seen subtly throughout the nebula. The clearly visible blue central (progenitor) star is believed to be a Wolf-Rayet star, brighter and hotter than usual.

The most interesting aspect of this object is the top and bottom HII ansae, also described as knots. These are likely resulting from bi-polar jet outflows. At the top, a winding corkscrew-like jet appears to protrude out of the nebula. These bi-polar outflows have been studied in detail for this nebula and they appear to increase in velocity with distance from the core.

A 2007 paper (THE PLANETARY NEBULA NGC 1360: A TEST CASE OF MAGNETIC COLLIMATION AND EVOLUTION AFTER THE FAST WIND, by Garcia-Diaz et al) describes this as one of the few PNe which has an intense stellar magnetic field detected in its core. The same paper describes the nebula appearance as follows:
”The fast stellar wind from the central star has died away at least a few thousand years ago and a back filling process has modified its structure producing a smooth, nearly featureless and elongated high excitation nebula. The central star conserves a strong magnetic field indicating that a magnetized stellar wind could have been responsible for axial collimation in the development of this planetary nebula. We have therefore studied the history of this nebula considering a process of magnetic collimation and then switching off the stellar wind and letting it evolve to its present time. The resulting model is able to successfully reproduce many of the observed key features in NGC 1360.”

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	6558352
PixInsight job	EHJHOFKC5RZY0MZ4XCH52ZEO6MPX7GAB
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	03h33m14s.743
RA (top/left)	03h34m02s.820
RA (top/right)	03h32m26s.347
RA (bottom/right)	03h32m27s.260
RA (bottom/left)	03h34m03s.225

Dec (center)	-25°52′17″.11
Dec (top/left)	-25°44′42″.26
Dec (top/right)	-25°45′01″.91
Dec (bottom/right)	-25°59′50″.70
Dec (bottom/left)	-25°59′31″.10

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