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View Full Version : Object of the Week July 12, 2020 - IC 1295, one of the best IC planetaries



Steve Gottlieb
July 13th, 2020, 12:33 AM
IC 1295 = PK 25-4.2 = PN G025.4-04.7
RA: 18h 54m 36.5s
DEC: -08° 49' 49"
Constellation: Scutum
Type: Planetary Nebula
Size: 102" x 87"
Mag: V ≈ 12.5
Gaia DR2 parallax distance = 4742 l.y.

IC 1295 has been mentioned before in the OOTW for NGC 6712 back in 2015, but it is certainly deserving of its own OOTW! William Herschel, who discovered nearby NGC 6712 missed this one, and so did his son John, when he reobserved the globular cluster from South Africa.

It was the American astronomer Truman Henry Safford, described on his Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truman_Henry_Safford) as a "calculating prodigy", who discovered IC 1295 on August 28, 1867. He was observing with the 18.5-inch Clark refractor at the Dearborn Observatory in Chicago.

In 1919, Heber Curtis reported it was undoubtedly a planetary nebula based on a photograph taken with the Crossley photograph. He described it as "Exceedingly faint; a faint, hazy ring about 2' x 1.5' in p. a. 90°±. The central portions are relatively vacant, and it is fainter along and at the ends of the major axis. There are three faint stars at the center, of which one is probably the central star."

Some of you may have a copy of the old Skalnate Pleso "Atlas of the Heavens". You'll find it plotted there, but mislabeled as IC 1298. That error was repeated in the first edition of the Sky Atlas 2000.0.

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Older sources list this object as faint as 15th magnitude (Roger Sinnott's 1988 "NGC 2000" is one). This was a classic case of an old photographic magnitude being out of sync with its visual magnitude. My first view was back in June 1981 through my C-8. Although fairly faint, it was easily visible in the same low power field as NGC 6712 (25' to the ESE). Walter Scott Houston at Sky & Telescope had asked for readers to send in observations, which I did, and I was surprised in the October issue when he reported back on some of the observations, and mentioned mine was through the smallest scope!

The following year (1982) I took another look and surprised to find it visible unfiltered using a 5" aperture stop on my 13.1" Odyssey I. In fact, it was quite easy using a UHC filter at 79x. So, if it's no problem for a 5", what is the smallest aperture that will show IC 1295?? Have a look and report back.

IC 1295 is located in a rich star field, which can make identifying a PN more challenging, but this guy is large -- 102" x 87" -- bigger than the Ring Nebula, so there's no problem picking it up at low power. Here's my last observation through my 24" at 220x both with and without a UHC filter:


"The rim was clearly brighter, particularly along the south side. But the west side of the planetary was weaker with a darker indentation, creating a "C" appearance, open to the west. A very faint, fairly thin outer shell was visible with careful viewing. This envelope was roughly the thickness of the brighter rim. Increasing to 375x and removing the filter, I counted 8 or 9 superimposed stars including several around or just off the edge.".

There are two stars near the center but I don't believe either of these is the central star.

But this is a "two-fer" with the stellar planetary K 4-8 just 4.7' NW in the same high power field! Now this one is stellar (at least at 500x or less), and about mag 14.2. It sits in the middle of a shallow arc (about 50" in length) of 5 stars, and you can easily identify it by blinking with a narrowband or OIII filter. This image of both PNe is from the late astrophotographer Rick Johnson.

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As always,

"Give it a go and let us know!
Good luck and great viewing!"

FaintFuzzies
July 13th, 2020, 05:10 AM
Good object Steve!

If my memory didn't fail me, I'm sure that I've seen this object several times with an 8", 16" and 22" telescopes. However, my notes are in paper and didn't dig them out. However, my most recent observation was at the 2008 CalStar.

22” (287x) – Very bright, very slightly elongated patch with a slightly darker center. “Double” central star. A 12.6 magnitude star on the SW edge and an extremely faint star on the NW edge. Lies in a rich star field. About 1.5’ across. PA = 90. Responds well to O-III filter.

wvreeven
July 13th, 2020, 08:54 AM
Here are my notes of August 3, 2005, using my home made 6" Newtonian telescope from a dark location in the south of France:

IC 1295 with the 20 mm eyepiece and O[III] can be seen as a large sphere. On the west side lies a faint star. To the north of it and a little further away lies a faint star. Northwest of that I see another faint star which could be the planetary nebula PK 25-4.1 (also known as PNG 25.3-4.6). Very nice such a low magnification and such a large planetary nebula. The globular cluster NGC 6712 is also faintly visible and the planetary nebula is about 2/3 the size of the globular cluster.

Raul Leon
July 13th, 2020, 12:05 PM
Hi here's my observation 7/5/2008; Ic 1295 is a planetary nebula in Scutum ; magnitude: 12.7 ; size:1.7'x1.4' ; fairly large; UHC filter works well on this object; flanked by stars on West and Northwest ; did not see central star ; I used a 10mm Radian at 158x with my 14.5 Starstructure Dob f/4.3 3956

Bertrand Laville
July 13th, 2020, 03:41 PM
Hi All,

Here are two drawings, with a 10" and a 25".
Detailed report here: http://www.deepsky-drawings.com/ic-1295/dsdlang/fr

Clear skies
Bertrand
http://www.deepsky-drawings.com/

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Jimi Lowrey
July 14th, 2020, 06:13 PM
I revisited IC 1295 and a beauty it is. What I found interesting is when I observed K 4-8 I did not get much of a response to the NPB filter. I thought this unusual so I tried a 0 III filter and boom it lit it right up. It was cool to see the big filter response with the 48”.

Uwe Glahn
July 18th, 2020, 09:12 PM
Unfortunately my digital observing logs seems to be incomplete, because of my former analog observing notes.

But I remember a nice observation 20 years ago with my unfiltered 20x125 binocular together with NGC 6712. Later I blinked successfully K 4-8 with my 16-inch.

My latest observation was with my actual 27-inch. And as Jimi said it is for real a beauty.

sketch: 27", 293x, [OIII], NELM 7m0+, Seeing III
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home (http://www.deepsky-visuell.de/Zeichnungen/IC1295.htm)

Dan Smiley
August 23rd, 2020, 07:10 PM
Hi,

I observed IC 1295 on August 12, 2020 in Northern California, conditions included good transparency and seeing, SQM-L 21.51. With my 12" f5 New Moon dob and unfiltered at 188x, IC 1295 was rather large, elongated somewhat east-west and had a "chunk missing" to the west which gave it a cape or heart like shape to my eye. The view came alive with an OIII and averted vision, and when I alternated between the averted and direct view it gave me the effect of a pulsing heart. I did not see an outer halo or central star. At the time, I didn't know about K 4-8 so I'll have to go back and try blinking that.

Perhaps a bit off topic, but I had noticed on my new interstellarum Deep Sky Atlas that about one degree to the east of IC 1295 is the open cluster NGC 6728. This is a rather scattered group with some stars in curves forming a rough football shape, a mag 8 star on the east edge. According to Steve Gottlieb's NGC notes, there is nothing in particular at William Herschel's discovery position and Prof. Harold Corwin has suggested Isserstedt 662 about a minute of RA west of Herschel's position. This is the object that seems to be accepted now as NGC 6728. Not exactly a stunning object, but along with globular NGC 6712, the two planetaries IC 1295 and K 4-8, this open cluster rounds out an interesting area of about 1.5 degrees.

Steve Gottlieb
August 25th, 2020, 06:10 PM
Coincidentally, I observed NGC 6728 a month earlier (same observing site as Dan Smiley) and looked at two possible candidates. The first object is Isserstedt 662. By the way, this designation isn't found in SIMBAD but here's Isserstedt's 1968 paper (http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/get_file?pdfs/VeBoc/0001/1968VeBoc...1....1I.pdf) (in German) that lists just over 1000 stellar groupings that supposedly mimic a ring-shape. Apparently, the idea was these "rings" had a constant size and could be used to estimate distance and possibly trace spiral structure in the Galaxy.

24" (7/18/20): at 200x, this scattered group (Isserstedt 662) stood out reasonably well, though visually it didn't appear as a distinct cluster. Roughly 30 stars were counted in a 6' region (about a dozen mag 11/12) including a few short arcs of 3 stars and one clump of 5 mag 11/12 stars. A mag 7.6 star is ~5' E. Located ~1 degree east of planetary nebula IC 1295.

Roughly 25' further east is a much larger, very scattered field (uncatalogued) with nearly 50 stars in a 15' region. But no clumps or denser areas caught my eye. Of the two candidates for NGC 6728, the first field was more prominent visually.

Dan Smiley
August 25th, 2020, 11:56 PM
I would personally agree that Isserstedt 662 corresponds to W Herschel's description of "A coarsely scattered clusters of stars; the stars nearly of an equal magnitude." Interesting about Isserstedt's "ring theory" of size and distance. This 2018 study, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.00947.pdf, if I'm reading it correctly, concludes NGC 6728 is about 5200 light years away and about 750 million years old. Based on the image in the paper, looks like they use Isserstedt 662=NGC 6728.

Steve Gottlieb
August 26th, 2020, 12:58 AM
Yep, it looks like NGC 6728 = Isserstedt 662 is a legitimate cluster. A large 2018 survey "Gaia DR2 open clusters in the Milky Way" found 231 stars with a membership probability greater than 0.5. It also found a likely distance of 5770 l.y., which fits in the range of 4631 - 5870 l.y. from the paper you mentioned.