The Lionel Murphy Nebula

N86 = SNR J0455  6839 is a nitrogen-abundant supernova remnant nicknamed the “Lionel Murphy SNR” after Lionel Murphy, an Australian politician and former Attorney General turned judge of Australia’s High Court. Murphy had a distinctive profile and a large nose that was broken in a 1950 car accident in England and left largely untreated. Astronomers Dopita, Mathewson, and Ford, who studied the supernova remnant N86 at Mount Stromlo Observatory in 1977, noticed that the SNR bore a remarkable resemblance to Murphy’s nose! It was published as a cartoon in the Canberra Times. Murphy was so delighted that he asked for a large, mounted photo of SNR N86 from the scientific paper and placed it in his High Court chambers in the place where the other High Court justices usually hung a portrait of the Queen!

16″ at 128x: To fully appreciate this faint SNR one needs a very dark sky, excellent transparency, good dark adaptation, and lots of averted vision. But even so, there isn’t too much to be seen of this most faint and fragmented SNR. With no filter, it appears as a large, faint, N-S oval-shaped haze, just south of a mag 11.8 star. The only prominent section lies directly south of the star – a not-much brighter streak of tattered remnant that curves to the east. And south of it two ~mag 14 stars lie in the haze, and a third fainter star popped in and out of view. I was surprised at the very weak contrast gain when I tried the OIII filter.