The lingering ghosts of dead stars

Supernova explosions may be incredibly dramatic, and their leftovers fascinating, but the light show from the death of ordinary stars is dazzling. How wonderful is it that all the garden-variety stars like our Sun live undistinguished lives in their galactic neighborhoods, churning out heat and light for billions of years… then they reach retirement age, and become unique and colourful works of art whose beauty is matched only by their mystery! Although we cannot see the LMC’s crop of planetary nebulae with the detail we see in our own galaxy’s planetary nebulae, Hubble has certainly captured some stunners.

Hubble probed the glowing stellar relics and brough us these gorgeous images. Credit: NASA, Hubble, copyrighted image of the Large Magellanic Cloud: D. Malin, Anglo-Australian Observatory/Royal Observatory

The Large Magellanic Cloud abounds in planetary nebulae but alas, most are too faint and too lost among the multitudes of stars for easy observing. However, there are eight that are relatively easy to find and, albeit they are but faint pinpricks of light, seeing planetary nebulae in the Large Magellanic Cloud is quite extraordinary.

You need dark skies and excellent transparency for observing the Cloud’s planetary nebulae. And a good OIII filter is essential. Fortuitously, a couple of the planetary nebulae are relatively easy to locate because of the star-hopping patterns that lead to them. However, as they are stellar in size and may be difficult to pick out among the stars, blinking with an OIII filter can tease out tiny planetary nebulae.