Under current full-moon conditions, I envisioned that a planetary nebula in narrowband would be a good object to go for. I selected Abell 39 and put that in the target manager of my remotely hosted telescope. The following morning, no images were taken, as the target was apparently not above the horizon.
It turned out that the target I had selected from the Simbad database was not Abell 39, but ACO 39. ACO is a list of galaxy clusters, put together by Abell, Corwin and Olowin in 1989. The list of planetary nebulae put together by Abell in 1966 is identified in the Simbad catalogue as ‘A66’, not ‘Abell’. So the code you’re looking for in Simbad is ‘PN A66 39’.
Another ‘safe’ way to find the Abell PN’s in a catalogue like Simbad is to use the code from the catalogue of Perek and Kohoutek, published in 1969. The naming convention there starts with ‘PK’. Abell 39 for example is PK 047+42.1. In order to do this cross-reference, I found a website from Uwe Glahn, which includes PK-ID’s for all Abell PN objects.
All this is only relevant if your own astroimaging software does not include a dedicated list of Abell PN objects.
📷 Abell,2.JPG
