The longer one participates in this hobby, the greater the desire to research and image rare and unusual objects. PuWe1 is one such object, as it had only been photographed 25 times on astrobin as of the time of posting. There is not much information about it, other than that it has a large apparent size (20') for a planetary nebula, that it is around 1200 light years away, and it is very faint.
I did a little research and found the discovery papers [1][2] by Austrian professors
Ronald Weinberger and
Alois Purgathofer, which were published in 1979 and 1980. They photographed it in near infrared with a 1.2m telescope and a custom cooled camera with a 35 minute exposure. Their photo was a bit underwhelming, but camera and processing tech have come a long way since then. I used many long (10 minute) exposures in bin4 and had to do quite a bit of denoising and other post-processing, but there is still quite a bit more detail in both Ha and OIII channels compared to the original discovery photo. Shot on 22 different nights between 3/10/2022 and 5/2/2022.
[1] Weinberger, Ronald, and Alois Purgathofer. "
Some observations of Stephenson's planetary nebula."
Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 91.540 (1979): 171.
[2] Purgathofer, A., and R. Weinberger. "
A huge new nearby planetary nebula."
Astronomy and Astrophysics 87 (1980): L5-L6.
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