The Headphones Nebula

This secretive little critter is lurking in the unlikely constellation of Lynx (the Lynx in case you didn’t guess). For some reason, you don’t normally find planetary nebulae there. It is called Jones-Emberson 1 (PK 164+31.1). The same Mrs Jones, I believe, that discovered Jones 1 in Pegasus. It looks about as faint as Jones 1, although is listed as brighter. As all astro-imagers say “it needs more exposure”; I only got 10 minutes of good enough quality images. Well, yes, it is a noisy (grainy) image, but it is also one of those very pleasing rare and unusual objects. The nebula looks a little bit ‘on the skew’ but is roughly symmetrical, making it not really look like its moniker above. I had to restack this using the super pixel mode on Deep Sky Stacker to get it to pick 10 1 minute frames, rather than the original 8. I’m a big fan of the super pixel mode – it combines the 2x2 colour matrix into one nice coloured pixel, and means I am not over sampling the image as much. Plus it speeds things up by a factor of 4.