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NGC 5979
ESO136-PN003, PK322-05.01
RA 15:47:43
Dec -61°52.7'
Planetary
nebula |
h: "planetary nebula, not bright, pF, S,
R, with something like a protruberance, which may arise from an accidental star,
on or close to the edge. Not quite sharp; a little furred; light not quite
uniform; an odd sort of mottling like a resolvable light; taken at first for a
vF double star out of focus; 12 arcseconds diameter, but seen with x240; x320 is
too high a power for it. See figure 7, Plate VI." On a second occassion
he wrote "planetary nebula, seen, and a diagram of the adjacent stars made,
but the stars are too dreadfully ill defined to-night to state any particulars
further than that it is decidedly not a star, but has a disc approx 8
arcseconds diameter." His third observation was recorded as "planetary
nebula, round, r arcseconds diameter, about equal in light to a 9th mag star; of
a feeble intensity of light, nearly equable; under 320 it is not nebulous, but
indistinct at the edges; a very singular kind of appearance - not 'mottled', not
'curdled', but yet not planetary. In a field with about 100 to 150 stars."
Sanford calls this a "small round
planetary nebula, almost stellar in appearance (8 arcseconds in diameter), and
at mag 13 rather faint in an 8-inch telescope."
Gerd Bahr-Vollrath (Noosa Heads, Queensland,
Australia) observing with an 8-inch f/12 SCT, writes in the The Webb Society
Nebulae and Clusters Section Report No. 10, July 1992: "Fairly large and
faint. A broad evenly illuminated ring is filled with fainter nebulosity." |
