

DSS image, 2nd generation blue
Central star?
Abell 79 is one of the brighter of the Abell planetaries. This observation was focused on trying to see the central star.


DSS image, 2nd generation blue
Observation with with a 28" f4 Alt-Az Newtonian
My notes from the night of October 27, 2006: "I concentrated on the central star, going up to 570x and found a couple of candidates - perhaps the fainter one? I'll check on-line in the next few days, but regardless, with the pretty decent seeing the view is quite nice. The planetary is dimmer than I remember from this past summer but at this higher power it showed more structure - more of a horseshoe shape. It showed up well up to 406x with the OIII filter better than the UHC. Great fun! 11:19pm"
By the way, the fainter stars were all seen without a filter. Sky conditions were very nice at the time: I rated the seeing a 7 out of 10, the transparancy 8 out of 10 with a limiting magnitude of 6.4. The temperature was 34F.
The DSS image at the bottom shows two central star candidates but with the position of the brightest one reversed and the position angle slightly off. The position angle is no doubt due to the inaccuracy of my eyepoiece sketch but I'm sure I had the relative brightness of the two drawn correctly. I'm not sure which is the central star, but if either of them are I'm guessing the fainter one in my sketch is it. I estimate it to be around 16th magnitude, but then I'm not particulalry accurate at estimating star magnitudes.
As sometimes happens, perhaps the DSS image changed the relative star brightnesses because of the wavelength of the image. Since many planetary nebulae central stars are rather blue, the blue DSS image may have accentuated it over my view in the eyepiece. Seems reasonable but that's only a guess on my part. Also, it's apparant that I exaggerated the size of the planetary, but that's the way eyepiece sketches often turn out.