Sky this Week

Messier 15 located in the constellation Pegasus is one of the densest planetaries known. Located northeast of the center of the globular is a challenging object to find, planetary nebula Pease-1. This was the first nebula discovered within a globular by Francis Pease in 1928.  

Follow the directions by Doug Snyder to locate this planetary which very near the core of M15 — you’ll need a high power eyepiece, an O3 filter, dark skies, and large scope to observe it directly.

Image taken on Sept 5, 2006 around 07:25 UT with a Celestron Nexstar11, Meade F3.3 focal reducer, and Astrovid Stellacam II. Temperature was 51°F, 75% humidity, sky was clear, transparency was very good, and turbulence about 6/10, in bright moonlight.  Stellacam II set at 9/14 gain, integrate 128 frames (4 sec exposure), medium gamma. The 15 minutes of video was dark subtracted; flat field and bias corrected with ImagePlus; aligned and stacked with with Registrax3; enhanced  and cropped with Photoshop Elements2.