Object of the Week, September 19, 2021 - NGC 7354 = PN 107.8+02.3 = PK 107+2.1 - Cepheus
R.A.: 22h40m19.9s
Dec.: +61°17'08"
Size: 22", Magnitude: 12.9
NGC 7354 is an often overlooked planetary nebula in Cepheus, and in September it is pretty much available all night for observers in the northern hemisphere, culminating tonight about an hour before midnight. This object was discovered by William Herschel on November 3, 1787. Dreyer described it as, "a planetary nebula, bright, small, round, pretty gradually a very little brighter middle". This 2010 paper…
… tells us that “…NGC 7354 has four main structures: a quite round outer shell and an elliptical inner shell, a collection of low-excitation bright knots roughly concentrated on the equatorial region of the nebula, and two symmetrical jet-like features, not aligned either with the shells' axes, or with each other…”, but I can tell you that in my 25” F/5 Obsession I saw a fairly small, fairly bright grayish disk that was a little annular and maybe a little oval in shape, with a subtle brightening of the rim in a couple of spots. I looked for but did not detect the central star. A lot of the pictures show a decidedly blue or green cast to this planetary nebula but all I saw was gray.
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