One of the things I enjoy to do now that I have a long focal length backyard setup in the C11 is to focus on certain regions I find interesting in other people's widefield image posts. The Clamshell nebula has been highlighted a few times on astrobin, most recently as IOTD in August. The IOTD in question is this
image by Thomas Fuchs. It is a phenomenal and detailed image, with lots of places to study and appreciate.
One particular odd feature was a bluish structure located at the top of LBN 389. I was not sure if it was a star that was bloated with an artifact or there was more to the story. Naturally, I decided to take a closer look and attempt imaging that region to find out more. After the first night session, it revealed a very interesting looking structure that appeared like an X and was definitely not a star, but a PN in the same area as the widefield image. It resembled an unusual looking planetary nebula. It looked unusual because it was not your typical spherical symmetrical planetary nebula. After further investigation on Simbad, I found it was PN Ou 5 after entering the coordinates. It was discovered not too long ago, in 2010 by the
IPHAS project in data taken on August 1, 2010 and independently by the French amateur astronomer Nicolas Outters in September 2012.
This is what it looked like up close in my image:
Despite being recently discovered, there was quite a bit of interesting literature on it. Turns out to be a very interesting object. It is an unusual planetary nebula because its central star is a short period
eclipsing binary, with an eclipsing period of only 8.7 hours.
It was noticed that the central star was variable, which is a strong indication for binarity.Here is a
great paper I found on this particular planetary nebula with detailed monochrome images taken from a 2.5m Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) and 2.6m Nordic Optical Telescope for those interested in reading more.
Clear Skies!
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