PuWe 1 — A Big and Faint Planetary Nebula

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Image Caption and Credits: Image of the planetary nebula PuWe 1 acquired from the Observatorio Astronómico de Aras de los Olmos. Vicent Peris (PTeam / OAUV), OAUV, OAO. Entirely processed with PixInsight 1.8.8. Click on the image to download a full-resolution version (image scale of 0.54 arcsec per pixel).

Links to the Images and Related Material

The PuWe 1 Planetary Nebula

PuWe 1 is one of the most difficult-to-image planetary nebulae. Its apparent size is comparable to the size of the full Moon and its gaseous material is far away from the progenitor star, so it glows very faintly. This picture is the result of 112 hours of exposure time with a Planewave 20" CDK telescope, plus 8 hours with a Canon 400 mm f2.8 lens. The image is a combination of frames acquired through 6 filters: H-alpha and O-III in narrowband plus Johnson BVR and Sloan z' in broadband. Below you can see the separate H-alpha (up) and O-III images (bottom), with 60.5 and 19.5 hours of total exposure time, respectively.

The broadband filters play an inportant role in this picture. One one hand, they contain the foreground galactic cirrus around the nebula:

On the other hand, they also contain a miriad of background galaxies that can be seen around and through the nebula:

To complement the broadband filters in the visible spectrum, a fourth wideband filter in the infrared has been added to highlight the infrared-emitting, far galaxies: