It’s time for another deep sky challenge and it’s in Lynx and now is a good time to look in Lynx. And the object we are going to look for is called Jones-Emberson 1, also known as PK 164+31.1, and also known as the headphones nebula. This object is a large planetary nebula located in the constellation Lynx. It’s 6.8 x 6 arc minutes which is quite large for a planetary nebula. It has an apparent magnitude of 12.1. It’s 1600 light years away. It was discovered in 1939 by Rebecca Jones and Richard Emberson. It can be seen with a 150mm or six inch telescope but it’s hard to see because of low surface brightness. It’s much easier to see from dark skies. Definitely use an OIII filter on this object and try to magnify to about 100x. And get a detailed star chart so you know exactly where to look for it. It will not appear on Sky & Telescope’s pocket sky atlas. So, you’ll need to use Stellarium or Sky Safari or Uranometria or Interstellarum. It is in the data base of the Argo Navis navigating system. I’ll give you the coordinates for it:
RA 7 h 57.9m
Dec +53 25’
I looked for this object with the Swan, my 15” reflector, my Skywatcher 12” reflector, and then after having no luck due to bad conditions went to a darker site with better conditions and tried with my 10” reflector, Herschel. I didn’t try with anything smaller than that although it is possible to see it with a smaller telescope if you go to a dark sky site.
After three attempts and with the help of a detailed photo from John Dolby I was able to precisely pinpoint where I should be looking for this difficult object and I also put my PVS night vision monocular on my focuser to see if it would show up and it did and then when I put the eyepiece back on it popped into view. I hope you can see it too. Dark skies are critical. Dark skies forever. Tsula signing off.
