Victor's Nebula | Astrophotographies

NEW DISCOVERY / NOUVELLE DISCOVERTE: Strottner-Drechsler 61 / Victor's Nebula

St-Dr 61 / Victor's Nebula is a probable planetary nebula which has just been discovered by the famous Franco-German team of Xavier Strottner and Marcel Drechsler who asked me to photograph this object located very close to the no less famous Heart nebula IC1805.

I could not expect to discover such beauty, which until then had escaped the many clichés of this region of the sky!

Indeed, the brightness of St-Dr 61 is very low and it took 66h30 of poses to reveal it.

Xavier and Marcel are now well known in the amateur community for the impressive number of their discoveries. The duo carry out their research mainly by scrutinizing the Surveys available online (surveys of astronomical objects made using telescopes and of satellites which in particular allow astronomers to establish catalogs celestial objects and to perform statistical analyzes on them, as well as this type of research).

From the detection of an interesting trace on a Survey of a possible unlisted object, the two amateurs carry out a set of research making it possible to determine the potential of this discovery (search for a white dwarf nearby, with a temperature and the convincing characteristics, isolation and interesting form of the detected "spot", absence of census in the databases etc ...).

This is how this team was able to find hundreds of objects (planetary nebulae, supernova remnants, nova etc.) by developing acuity, perseverance, great rigor but also by developing specific techniques in its research now recognized within the international scientific community.

The scientific data of this object :

Victor's nebula / StDr 61 / PN-G 140.4-21.2

Constellation: Cassiopeia

Coordinates: 02 35 23.84 +63 03 02.35

Apparent diameter: 15 arcmin

Actual diameter: 3.5 light years

Distance of the white dwarf CSPN (central star of planetary nebula): 800 light years

Spectroscopic data produced by Pascal Le Dû

Acquisition data :

66h30 of poses in October 2021 in Amiens (France) with:

Newton 250mm f / 4

CEM120 mount

Camera ZWO ASI 2600mm + RGB & HO 3.5nm filters

H: 281 x 300s O: 442 x 300s RGB: 70x120s / 70x120s / 49x120s

Acquisitions and pre-processing: Mathieu Guinot

Processing: Marcel Drechsler

The following captures show the weakness of the Halpha signal and especially Oiii: on a raw image of 300s no signal trace except for the relatively bright left Halpha part. On the final stack of 37h in Oiii the signal remains discreet but clearly visible, especially on the inverted and strongly stretched image.

Halpha raw image from 300s

Raw image Halpha inverted and boosted

Halpha integration of 281 x 300s (23h40)

Halpha integration of 281 x 300s inverted and boosted

Raw image Oiii from 300s

Raw image Oiii inverted and boosted

Oiii integration of 442 x 300s (37h)

Oiii integration of 442 x 300s inverted and boosted

Description of the item by Xavier Strottner:

Strottner-Drechsler 61, officially registered by Pascal Le Dû in list 1 of the NP candidates, is a probable planetary nebula located in the constellation Cassiopeia and 800 light years from Earth.

Located in the region of the famous Heart Nebula IC1805 and with an apparent size of 15 arc min, this find is proof that even in the immediate vicinity of cosmic "tourist attractions", real treasures await to be discovered.

We discovered this planetary nebula candidate with my teammate Marcel Drechsler at the end of 2020 during our research in the northern hemisphere. A spectrum produced at the beginning of the year by Pascal Le Dû provides proof that this object has all the characteristics of a real planetary nebula.

The CSPN (central star of planetary nebula), a white dwarf (blue color) located in the center of the nebula.

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