"PaRasMoMi-1" Or, the "Bubblegum Nebula", is a new 'OIII' dominated Planetary Nebula candidate discovered by us in April 2021



Read full story - https://www.utkarshmishraastrophotography.com/post/discovery-of-giant-bubble-nebula-in-monoceros-constellation

The initials stand for: "Dana Patchick -Sakib Rasool-Sankalp Mohan-Utkarsh Mishra".

Check my website blog post for more information regarding our new discovery.

it was Discovered by all four of us in April 2021 and we tried to guess what this object could be using the data that was available online, no doubt this new discovery needs some good scientific study 😃.

*(Almost same size of moon in terms of apparent size)*

PaRasMoMi-1 lies in the constellation Monoceros and is 5942 ly (light-years) away from earth.

It is near the Rosette nebula/NGC 2237 and is officially designated at Hong Kong/AAO/Strasbourg H-alpha planetary nebula database. Comprehensive database of all known planetary nebulae.

Our potential planetary nebula candidate was discovered via examining amateur astrophotographs which revealed a shell structure in the extreme corner of the image.

PaRasMoMi-1 object details:

PN-G: 206.2+00.6

Coordinates: 06:41:30.00 +06:16:30.00

Size: 26 arcmins (Almost apparent size of the moon)

We decided to photograph our new discovery, so we contacted *Patrick Dufour and he imaged it for around 20hrs from his remote observatory in Chile. He used a 12" AG Optical RC Telescope and QHY 600 Mono CMOS camera with SHOLRGB filter to capture the region. Since the object was only visible in OIII we asked him to capture as much OIII as possible and Patrick did a great job by collecting the data quickly - as the object was close to the horizon.

Patrick supplied us with the data and I started examining it and created a few Continuum free images of OIII and H-alpha to really bring out the structure details.

***Check our Patrick's gallery for wonderful images ! - https://www.astrobin.com/users/patdufour/

Now the question is; What is this object? Note that our main goal here is to find hidden planetary nebulae. This could be one of them - but there are many mimics or maybe even more strange objects like PaRasMoMi-1. By studying the properties of the object we can understand what this object could be. To be honest, right now, we can only guess about this object as it has some properties of planetary nebula and shows properties of a Stromgren sphere. Speaking in theoretical physics terms - there can be a sphere of hydrogen (HII) around young stars of spectral class O or B. In short - it means that usually spectral class O or B stars are responsible for such structures. They are by nature on the hot side - around 30,000K+ and they emit very strong energetic UV radiation. If we check the Galex NUV survey we can see how strong the star shines there.

PaRasMoMi-1 could be a very old and evolved planetary nebula - as it does have some properties of PNe. There is also a White dwarf near the center and another W.D. further off-center that are contenders, but the temperatures required are not sufficient. On occasion, the temperature of a cspn (central star of the planetary nebula) is indeed misleading, or simply wrong. This can have several causes, e.g. cosmic gas scattering blue components of the star's light. Then even Gaia has no chance of determining the correct temperature. Even with multiple star systems, where one part is a WD, the temperature reading is almost always wrong. On the plus side - it is also nicely visible on the 12um WISE plate, where a majority of PN shines nicely. Even Dr. Quentin Parker said that this object does have some properties of PN

Processing information

This object is quite faint and it took me 20days to process and bright out the structure of these regions

Processing was performed in these two Software: Photoshop and Pixinsight.

Stretching of the Color data in Pixinsight

Making Continuum free image to understand the structure of this nebula

combining them in PS using my own methods

Removing all-stars from the Narrowband data and pulling out the faint structure with help of noise reduction, there were lots of attempts in making the final image and now I am completely satisfied with the results.

In the end, I would like to thank my friends Dana, Sakib, Marcel, Xavier and of course my teammate Sankalp, without you all this discovery wouldn't have been possible.

I would also like to thank Patrick Dufour who took the job to produce the first amateur image of PaRasMoMi-1

Technical Information

Imaging telescopes or lenses: AG Optical 12.5" iHW

Imaging cameras: QHYCCD QHY600

Mounts: iOptron CEM120 EC2

Guiding telescopes or lenses: AG Optical 12.5" iHW

Guiding cameras: ZWO ASI290MC

Software: Pixinsight 1.8 · NINA - Nighttime Imaging ‘N’ Astronomy

Filters: Astrodon Ha 50mm 5nm · Astronomik LRGB IIc lrgb · Astrodon S2 50mm 5nm · Astrodon O3 50mm 5nm

Dates: April 8, 2021 , April 10, 2021 , April 11, 2021 , April 14, 2021 , April 15, 2021 , April 17, 2021 , April 18, 2021

Frames:

Astrodon Ha 50mm 5nm: 27x600" (4h 30') (gain: 26.00) bin 1x1

Astrodon O3 50mm 5nm: 55x600" (9h 10') (gain: 26.00) bin 1x1

Astrodon S2 50mm 5nm: 12x600" (2h) (gain: 26.00) bin 1x1

Astronomik LRGB IIc lrgb: 124x120" (4h 8') (gain: 26.00) bin 1x1

Integration: 19h 48'

Avg. Moon age: 14.14 days

Avg. Moon phase: 12.42%