The spare tire is always worth having just in case. I brought mine all the way from Namibia. Here it is, IC 5148 colloquially known as the Spare Tire Nebula. The object was registered in cooperation with my colleague
@Mateusz Kalisz , with the help of the SW 405/1800 telescope in the Dobsonian system.
IC 5148, known as the Spare Tire Nebula, is not only a very aesthetic and rewarding object for astrophotography but also an interesting nebula due to its properties. The nebula, located about 3,000 light-years away from Earth, is one of the fastest expanding planetary nebulae. It expands at a rate of 50 km/s, which is 180,000 km/h. Of course, this is not much compared to, for example, the remnants of the M1 supernova explosion, which expands at a rate of 1500 km/s, but in the category of planetary nebulae, IC 5148 occupies one of the top positions.
IC 5148 is located near the "neck" of the southern constellation of Grus and is an object easy to find in the southern sky. It was discovered by Australian amateur astronomer Walter Gale on June 4, 1894. Lewis A. Swift also observed it on July 23, 1897. Because the positions of the object given by both astronomers were not precise and differed from each other, John Dreyer, compiling his IC catalog (Index Catalogue), concluded that they observed two different objects and originally cataloged Gale's observation as IC 5150 and Swift's as IC 5148.
This relatively dark object visually resembled more a ring of matter around a darker center than what we see in contemporary photographs, hence its amusing nickname. Today, with the development of image registration techniques, the nebula resembles more an ethereal flower with layered petals and various shades of gas.
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