Abell 71 is a lovely large planetary nebula in Cygnus, not far from Deneb, that according to data in the SIMBAD database is about 2376 light years away (729 parsecs). Its quite large at nearly 3 arc minutes across. I'll update the description here when I get back from the field as I need to research it some more. UPDATE: The 729 parsecs listed in SIMBAD is from a measurement in 2008. When I look at the image, the central progenitor star appears to be the pale blue dim star just above and to the left of the bright star near the center of the disk. Gaia data lists this star as Gaia DR2 2071605220993676544, at 19.2 magnitude (Gaia G[reen] filter) with a parallax of 0.8958±0.3315 milli-arcseconds. The works out to being between 814 and 1772 parsecs with the most likely value being near 1116 parsecs due to the inverse nature of parallax to distance. That seems a reasonable distance given the size of the nebula making it about 3 light years across, so that pale blue dot probably is the progenitor star. That makes it roughly the same physical size as M27 which is 3x the angular diameter and 1/3 as far away and is also about 3 light years across!

I got chance to image this object on a good dark night from a dark site when it was near zenith. I was careful with flat and darks processing so that I wouldn't have to do gradient removal. As a result, this image seems to show a lot of interesting background nebulosity behind the planetary that includes plenty of red H-alpha emission along with hints of a pale blue reflection nebula. The scene also appears to have numerous streams of thin dust here and there that tinges some parts of the image brown and the reflection nebula slightly green(!). I need to analyze the image some more to make sure these are all real (especially the faint reflection nebula and dust lanes) and not an imaging artifact that should have been removed. VERDICT: subsequent analysis, it seems to be all real, at least as far as I can tell.

This is a stack of 8 eight minute images. Each image was composed of 240 two second subs live-stacked in SharpCap.