Abell 39 is a planetary nebula in the constellation of Hercules. This quirky, delightful bauble is one of those deep-sky objects I’ve wanted to photograph since the moment I learned of it. Planetary nebulae are usually admired for their remarkable shapes and structures, but Abell 39 is striking to me for rather the opposite reason: it appears as an almost perfectly spherical, turquoise, soap bubble, with ripple-like shimmers of structure throughout. Amidst the negative space of a relatively featureless, dusty black backdrop of space, dotted with galaxies and stars, Abell 39 captures my imagination a delightful way. Like some sort of cosmic being’s child blew a bubble that has yet to pop.
This photograph was a bit of a bear to edit up, but mainly for reasons of my doing: one of my broadband sessions was captured, accidentally, in Bin2 mode, while, of course. I remembered to shoot flats for that session in Bin1. And because I image on the road and tear down after each session, flats captured after re-assembly didn’t quite match. I’ve detailed how I dealt with that and other post-processing challenges on my website (linked below) for any interested.
In the end, I have a photograph I love. Abell 39 is such a lovely object to me, and being able to bring out some of the dust in the region adds extra interest to the negative space. I kept a wider field of view than I originally planned. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why, but something about the extra breathing room really emphasizes the beauty of this object in my eyes.
I photographed Abell 39 during a few nights of camping in April and May 2024 in Skull Valley, located in Utah’s west desert, United States. Edited in PixInsight and Adobe Photoshop using 13 hours and 55 minutes of images. I used two telescopes: my Celestron EdgeHD 8 with 0.7x reducer, and my Takahashi ε180D with 1.5x extender. It combines mono narrowband OIII data with broadband data collected with both telescopes.
At My Website
Detailed post-processing notes, a starless version, and more:
https://mypetstars.com/astrophotography/Abell39
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