Astronomy deep sky object designations have had a long and complex history. 70 years ago, many esteemed astronomers were discovering and designating new objects and creating catalogues in an exciting frenzy of activity.  But many times, they would discover the same object in the same timeframe.  In time, we have ended up with many catalogs, often with duplicate objects. This link shows 1000 catalogues, some famous, many obscure.  This creates a wealth of opportunity for us astrophotographers, but also leads to confusion about where to find potential interesting and unique objects to image.

One of the more interesting catalogues is the Minkowski Catalogue.   During his work in the 1940s at the Mount Wilson Observatory, Dr. Rudolph Minkowski published 3 papers which doubled the number of planetary nebulae known at that time. Interestingly, Dr. Minkowski did not number these objects.  Instead, in later years, the PNe listed in these three papers were recognized by the designators M 1-xx, M 2-xx, and M 3-xx.  Later, in 1965, Perek and Kohoutek added additional objects from Minkowski's observations which became known as the M 4-xx list.  

The Minkowski catalog contains mostly PNe (207), but also includes large nebula (40) such as the Pelican and Fishhead Nebulae, 1 galaxy, 1 supernova remnant, and 7 stars.  Some of the objects also have NGC, IC, and SH2 designations.

Many of the Minkowski PNe are stellar in size and not particularly interesting, but there are some good ones.  With this poster, I show what I consider to be the best PNe of each of the 4 Minkowski lists.  So many interesting PNe are contained here, including:

- The triple star progenitor system of M 1-90 (Sh2-71)
- The bipolar reflection nebula M 1-92, better known as Minkowski’s Footprint, which is actually a proto-planetary nebula.
- The bipolar emission nebula M 2-9, better known as both Minkowski’s Butterfly and the Twin Jet Nebula.
- The point symmetric PN M 3-1, with a beautiful red ansae at each polar end.

The technical data for the PNe of the poster are shown in Revision E.  If you would like to read more about any of these objects, each of the objects in the poster has previously been uploaded and described individually on Astrobin. They all reside in my Astrobin Minkowski PN Collection.

This effort is part of the 50 posters and 1700+ sky objects currently being compiled in my upcoming eBook, which I will make freely available upon completion.