Please do not be too severe in judging the optical quality of this photo: what you see here is a tiny crop out of the corner of
a wide-field image taken with an 80mm/f=384mm refractor. In fact this is 1/67 of the area of the original image.
19 December 2022 update: I have completely reprocessed the image starting from a drizzle 2x2 integration and applying BXT in linear phase. Oblong stars have been partially corrected, nevertheless the overall image quality has clearly improved, even at large magnification. Interesting to note that if the original image is too under-sampled, as it is in this case, BXT leads to square stars. Drizzling was therefore necessary.
In the picture is a rarely imaged object, the Planetary Nebula PK 102-02.1, also known as Abell 79 or PN G102.9-02.3.
Just a few pieces of information are available. I have found just one distance measurement, placing it at 1801 parsecs (5871 light years).
Given the relative rarity of the object, I decided to publish the PN closeup as a separate image.
Comments