August 2022 - Picture of the Month
Weinberger 1-10 in Cygnus
I've chosen a planetary nebula (PN) that, despite rising high in the northern night sky this month, definitely isn't one for the visual observers. It's that small bluish circular object near the centre of the image: Weinberger 1-10.
Weinberger 1-10 was discovered during a search of the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS) photographic plates. It was one of twelve that would be published in New planetary nebulae of low surface brightness (Astronomy and Astrophysics, Suppl. Ser., Vol. 30, p. 343 - 348) by Ronald Weinberger in 1977. He had good eyes as a young man of 29. I can't see much on the Digitised Sky Survey (DSS) images, and this was one of the most obvious PNs that he spotted.
Weinberger 1-10 is a reasonably large object at 190 arc-seconds in diameter, but is indeed low surface brightness. As you can see in Jens' image, this PN is almost hidden by the surrounding bright nebula (LBN 381) which is itself not particularly bright. The PN's central star is 18.7 magnitude.
And yet, this image shows detail around the edges of that faint bubble. I chose this image of Weinberger 1-10, and there aren't many, because the composition conveys the tenuousness of this structure, nestled on the edge of that Hα emission in the dense star fields of Cygnus. A challenge indeed.
James Whinfrey - Website Administrator.
