Trying to identify a planetary nebula used in a 1966 video by 'The Byrds' (Really!)

I vote for the Little Ghost Nebula, NGC 6369.

Hi Arnie,

My thanks for your suggestion that it might be NGC 6369.  That beautiful PN is a complete ring, however, and doesn't show the 'breaks' like our mystery nebula shows off.

I've not seen any versions of NGC 6369 that might suggest such an outlook, either.

Check out Reuben Barbosa's nice shot of 6369, that is right here on 'Astrobin'.  https://www.astrobin.com/375188/?nc=all

I think we need to continue the hunt.  All best!
-Dana

Hi Jerry -

Your earlier post of the unknown nebula was nicely solved by Konstantin Firsov.

Now, I see you've got an edited version of our mystery PN.  Has the 'Google Lens' let us down?

Great effort, though!

-Dana

Hello Andrea,

Very much agree that this is a older, likely non-hypered plate from the 1960's, or older.  After all - the video itself was produced in 1966, which 
makes it clear they  used astronomical pictures taken  56 or more years ago.   Probably from Mount Wilson or Palomar.

NGC 40 is a good guess, but careful checking of the field stars tell us this isn't the one we're looking for.  Something morphologically similar, though.

-Dana

Could it show the brighter parts of M 57? It seems that some stars are fitting if you compare the one at 1:39 with this one (after turning):

https://www.astronomycameras.com/blog/archive/20080807/m57-from-deutschland/

Harald

Hi Harald,

Tough to make that case.  The central star is quite bright in our mystery nebula as compared to what we see in M57.

Think the image in the video is a poor example of M 57, perhaps very old. I only compared the positions of the stars.
In the image of 1:39 you see 3 stars in a vertical line going through the center of the nebula, then there is a star within the nebula at 4 o´clock.
Left from the lower star of the three in line are two stars, one brighter, from there going up it looks like there are the two stars close to each other right under the head stock of Chris Hillmans bass guitar and above the head stock in a distance another star. I think all these stars are also in the image I linked.

Not sure if there is still interest in this topic - but I wanted to see if I could recreate it from my own data.  I had about 2 hours on Helix with 3nm Ha and I matched it to the rough orientation and stretched it somewhat normally first, then with high contrast to mimic the image in question.  Only global stretches were applied and no masking.  So the split aspect of the Helix does show up strongly - and you wouldn't guess it from a normal view of it.  The overall structure doesn't match perfectly but I think it's because the 3nm blocks out the Nii emission, which is fairly strong here and would have shown well in a red filtered image.

The star brightnesses will be very different also due to the Ha filter - but there are stars in about the right locations to match the main ones.

Judge for yourself:



Frank