Most Distant Nebula to image?

[tomato]

I was just idly thinking about what is meant by Deep Sky imaging, my conclusion is we apply that term to anything outside of the Solar System. But then there are certainly different orders of magnitude of distance to the objects we image. Most nebulae are relatively local with most named objects being in our own galaxy though there are some named objects in M33 and M31 for example. We all know if you want to go really, really deep with amateur equipment then Quasars are your best bet, but what about a really distant Nebula? A quick Google search came up with Himiko, a Lyman-alpha blob with a redshift of z=6.6. It is in the constellation of Cetus  but has an apparent magnitude of around 25. It is in the Stellarium database but I have no data on it's angular apparent size, I'm guessing it is tiny.

 Does anybody have any other more realistic candidates?

[ollypenrice]

Would you count galactic tidal tails? They do usually contain stars, it's true, but we clearly record non-stellar nebulosity and all nebulae (I think?) are energized or illuminated by stars.  Stephan's Quintet is at about 290 million LY and 'easy.'

Olly

[SamAndrew]

Depends what wavelength you're imaging at . You could say the inital universe was one big nebula, so the microwave background is the most distant nebulosity.

[tomato]

I’m restricting the search to LRGB or NB imaging. I think Olly’s suggestion would just about qualify but as discrete nebulae go are we looking at Ha clouds in our neighbouring galaxies?

I’ve just remembered that I just about managed to record the plasma jet from 3C 273, at 2.4 billion light years, that could be  a good candidate?

[John]

NGC 604 in Messier 33 ?

Edit: no competition for quasar distances of course !

 

Edited February 26 by John

[ONIKKINEN]

At what point does nebula imaging become galaxy imaging? If we look outside the milky way then almost every nebula is a part of some other galaxy rather than an isolated target.

For targets of appreciable size the magellanic clouds would fit the nebula imaging criteria, the Tarantula nebula region in particular. Cant do that from Europe though.

M33 is a good one, with some focal length you could argue its more nebula imaging than galaxy imaging.