Although not bright and flashy, this is the first color amateur image that I know about of a very faint potential planetary nebula in the constellation Perseus called FR 2-23. FR 2-23 is about the size of the full moon in the sky and consists mainly of HII (Ha) emission with a bit of OIII emission just below the bright area of Ha. Faint Ha emission extends beyond this in a roughly circular pattern. Whether this is a real planetary nebula is unknown and will probably remain so until a spectrum is taken using professional telescopes. The object is at RA 03 14 41.52 Dec +48 07 36.7. There are quite a few faint PGC galaxies and some quasars in the image as can be seen on this
annotated image. The image resolution is 1.28 arcsec/pixel. The object was discovered by Dr. David Frew.
The image was taken from my home observatory under Bortle 5 skies.
Update: FR 2-23 was updated to a likely planetary nebula in the HASH planetary nebula database after I shared this image with a colleague interested in planetary nebula who passed it to other planetary nebula researchers. It's gratifying to be able to help professional astronomers using amateur data that I was able to collect.
Comments