A Complete Morphological Catalog of Northern Galactic Planetary Nebulae

Manchado, A.; Guerrero, M. A.; Stanghellini, L.; Serra-Ricart, M.
Referencia bibliográfica

American Astronomical Society, 189th AAS Meeting, late abstracts, #120.14; Bulletin of the American Astronomical, Vol. 29, p. 732

Fecha de publicación:
1
1997
Número de autores
4
Número de autores del IAC
1
Número de citas
3
Número de citas referidas
2
Descripción
Planetary Nebulae (PNe) are highly representative of the last stages of intermediate mass stellar evolution. However, there are still many unresolved questions concerning their evolutionary scheme. Mass loss processes during the Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) are not fully understood. Binarity, rotation and magnetic fields may play an important role in PNe formation. The morphological study of PNe will help to address those questions, and therefore a rational and homogeneous data base is needed. Searching through the literature we have not found a homogeneous catalog of northern PNe. There are only some incomplete works of a few dozen PNe (Balick 1987; Chu et al 1987), and an incomplete catalog of southern PNe (Schwarz et al. 1992). We aim to fill the gap by compiling a complete catalog of extended northern PN. This catalog has the following characteristics: (a) It is homogeneous (all the images were obtained with the same instrument), and complete for all the PNe with -10(deg) < delta and with diameters larger than {4('') }, as stellar PNe cannot be used for this kind of study. (b) In order to obtain a sharp image of the different ionized regions, images were obtained through narrow band filters: Hα , [N {ii}] and [O iii]. (c) It excludes all the objects with doubtful classifications, as well as the PNe included in Balick (1987) and Schwarz et al. (1992). Since the summer 1993, 243 objects were observed. 143 PN have diameters bigger than {12('') } and were observed with the 80 cm IAC80 telescope at the Observatorio del Teide (Tenerife). The other 100 PN have diameters between {4('') } and {12('') } and were observed with the 2.54 m NOT telescope at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos (La Palma). Both sets of observations were carried out with the IAC-CCD camera. This camera is equipped with a 1024 x 1024 Thomson CCD. The field of view was {7{(') }.4} for the IAC80 and {2{(') }.4} for the NOT observations. Different narrow band filters were used in both observations. At the IAC80 a [O iii] lambda 5007 Angstroms (FWHM=30 Angstroms) and a Hα + [N {ii}] (FWHM=100 Angstroms) were used. At the NOT telescope, in addition to the same [O iii] filter, two Hα (FWHM=9 Angstroms) and [N {ii}] (FWHM=9 Angstroms) were used. Exceptional good seeing conditions allowed an image quality of {0('') .4} in s ome of the images. The catalog has been published in book form. Here as an example we present some composite real color images of PNe of different morphological classes, produced by combining the Hα + [N {ii}] with red, and the [O {iii}] with green. References Balick B., 1987, AJ 94, 671 Schwarz H. E., Corradi R. L. M.,Melnick, J., 1992, AAS, 96, 23 Chu, Y.-H., Arendt, R., Jacoby, G.H., 1987, ApJS, 64, 529