IC 3568 – the Lemon Slice Planetary Nebula

About the Object

well, that was a tough cookie. IC3568, a.k.a the Lemon Slice planetary nebula is a very small, bright and high contrast planetary nebula in Camelopardalis only 8 degrees away from Polaris - so really an object for us northerners :-) It got a bit of fame by a beautiful highly structured HST image a while ago - well you cannot beat a good telescope on an excellent site … On astrobin, however only a few attempts are published.

Observation Notes

The image I share here is an HOO narrowband with Oiii clearly the dominant emission. No standard stretching method worked on this object (unless you want to have an extended blue-white blob), in order to work out the faint substructure I had to do repeated small stretches followed by HDRMultiScaleTransform.

For the stars I used the excellent Planck Star Color Mapping script by @Rainer Raupach , which matches Planck curves to the stellar Oiii and Halpha luminosities - IMO the best method (other than taking RGB stars) to get reasonable looking stars from narrowband data.

data were taken on 2026 April 28,29,30, and May 1

Technical Details

View the full-resolution image together with complete acquisition and processing details on AstroBin.