Kronberger 61

This ultra-faint nebula was discovered by an amateur, Matthais Krohnberger, while poring over data in the Digitized Sky Survey. The nebula is estimated to be 25 mag/arc sec., so it is extremely faint and probably cannot be seen visually in any amateur telescope.

This image was taken here at my observatory with the 305mm F3.8 Honders astrograph, a 4 hour total exposure with 600 sec subs, Baader narrow band OIII filter. Note the open cluster NGC6791 at the bottom of the image.

Rolando

Attached Image:

This is a crop of the nebula itself, upscaled to 2x the original full size and processed in PS3. You can begin to see the structure and the "soccer ball" appearance.

There is a mag 10 star to the left of the planetary which has a small faint spiral galaxy just below it. Somewhat below and slightly to the left of the nebula is a very faint edge-on galaxy. Both of these showed up better in red light in a 20 minute exposure.

This may be the first amateur image of this very faint object.

Rolando

Attached Image:

Roland:

It took me a while to find it, I thought either my eyes were playing tricks or that you had posted the wrong image.. Definitely not a visual target..

Jon

Good morning Roland,

FANTASTIC! It gives me an idea of the size of this object. Congrats on the capture! Which camera did you use for an idea of image scale?

Eric

Excellent work, Roland.
As expected, this shows well in OIII.
My best regards,

dan

Thanks all, for your comments.

Keep shooting!

Rolando

Rolando,
Cool catch! This guy is barely visible on DSS and you got substantially better detail on the nebula.