Blue Flash Nebula

[pbyrne]

Hi all

Nice and cold here last night, I was looking around Delphinus, grabbed the globular NGC 7006 and the planetary NGC 6905, known as the Blue Flash Nebula. This is a small, though bright, nebula, visible without a filter and better with an O-III.

I wondered how it got the name and found on the Internet that some have described a blue colour, I did not see any colour, just the usual grey tint I normally see in planetaries.

Still it was a nice grab, another Herschel 400 object seen and sketched.

[Talitha]

I've always wondered why some planetary nebulae show a beautiful blue color and others don't.

The Blue Snowball definitely shows it, as well as the Saturn nebula.

But not the Ring or the Helix.