Abell31: The Moon Jelly Nebula

[Seti Astro]

Abell 31 (SH2-290), what I am calling The Moon Jelly Nebula, is a very dim Planetary Nebula in Cancer.

Even with 32hrs of integration time it was a lot of effort to pull it out nicely from the background.  Ha was the strongest, and the core full of OIII was well visible.  SII on the other hand was almost nonexistent!  Abell31 is described as "ancient" but didn't find more on the age and lies around 2000 lightyears away.  It being so old is why it is sooo dim as all the gases are dispersing and very far from the central white dwarf now greatly reducing the gasses ionization.

In the surrounding starfield there is a handful galaxies and a lot of the discovered by GAIA and are very dim and faint.  There is no distance data to any of the GAIA galaxies I could find either.  The other interesting item is a very close double star HD76037A&B, they are just shy of 300 lightyears away and only 9 arcsec apart.  Although I couldn't find if they are true binaries or not, their parallax would suggest they probably are: 10.9939 and 11.0133 milli-arcsecs which is 296.01lyrs and 296.5lyrs away.

Link to Astrobin: https://astrob.in/8ktleh/0/

Link to a video I made on this image: https://youtu.be/wxrax_QcQS4

Comments always appreciated!

 

Moon Jelly VS Ha Channel

 

HD76037A&B

 

GAIA Galaxies

[WolfieGlos]

Wow, you’ve really pulled that one out. I captured nearly 15 hours on sh2-290 last year and it was still a noisy mess. I intend to resume this year (when the clouds and Moon clear off) but seeing that total time is a daunting prospect.

Well done! 

[Seti Astro]

Thanks! 

If I were to realocate my time I would not have spent it on SII.  It is sooo incredibly weak.  So that is my only recommendation, skip that channel! 

[WolfieGlos]

Given that I’m OSC rather than mono, I’ll be skipping SII anyway! Saying that, I have been thinking about buying an SII/OIII dual so I’ll know not to use it here, so thanks for the tip 😃

I suspect my sub lengths weren’t long enough too, seeing as you were using 900s frames so that might be part of it.

Anyway, once again, great image.

[RobertI]

Superb image and interesting background information.