Instrument

12.5" RCOS @ ~ f/9 (2880 mm fl) at 0.64 arcsec/pixel. Shown at  0.64 and 1.28 arcsec/pixel.

Mount

Paramount ME

Camera

SBIG STL-11000 w/ FW8 filter wheel & AstroDon 3nm OIII and Gen-2 LRGB filters.

Acquisition Data

9/15/2017 to to 11/9/2017 Chino Valley, AZ.  with CCD Commander & CCDSoft.  AOL guided

Exposure

eXcalibrator RGB ratios are 1.00, 1.05 & 1.19

Software & Processing Notes

• CCDSoft, CCDStack, PixInsight, Photoshop CS6.

• eXcalibrator v5.1 for (g:r) color balancing, using 118 stars from the SDSS-DR9 database.

• CCDBand-Aid to repair KAI-11000M vertical bars.

• CCDStack to calibrate all sub exposures.

• PixInsight to register, normalize, data reject, combine the sub exposures, gradient removal, non-linear stretching with HistogramTransformation and to create the LRGB image.

• Noiseware 5, a PhotoShop plug-in.

• PhotoShop final touch-up includes adding the OIII data to the green and blue channels and  background noise reduction.

Comment

Shown rotated 113° counterclockwise.

Discovered by Rebecca Jones in 1941, Jones 1 (PN G104.2-29.6) is a planetary nebula in the constellation Pegasus. Little is written about the nebula. A singular reference gives it a distance of about 2,300 light years from Earth.  A small hydrogen cloud is visible to the left.

The central bright, very hot, blue star is the progenitor. The star will eventually cool and become a white dwarf. At this stage of evolution, it will no longer emit enough ultraviolet radiation to ionize the OIII gas. The nebula will then become invisible.

Jones 1 is classified as a type IIIb very faint planetary nebula. It is extremely difficult to see visually. Modern CCD photography and aggressive image processing changes all that.