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Plan

  • Tonight
  • Night Outlook
    • Weather
  • Targets
    • Saved targets
  • Plan a night
  • Night plans
    • Logbook

Tools

  • Sky atlas
  • Field of View
  • Exposure Lab
  • Calculators
  • Horizon Studio
  • Sequence Studio
    • Nights
    • Projects

Setup

  • Settings
  • About & Support
  • What’s new

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  1. Targets
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  3. Sharpless 116

 

Sharpless 116

Abell PN 71

Set a site to see tonight's sky

When Sharpless 116 is up, how long it stays usable and when it is in season all depend on where you observe from. Set your site and this page adds tonight's answer and its year.

Set it on Tonight

The science

What you are looking at

In one sentence

The ionised gas shell an evolved, sun-like star sheds as it dies, lit by the exposed hot core left behind.

Class explainer for planetary nebula (SIMBAD classification).

The facts

Sharpless 116 is a planetary nebula in Cygnus, catalogued as Abell PN 71. SIMBAD gives its distance as 0.740 kpc (−0.148 kpc / +0.148 kpc) — ≈ 2,410 ly from 2 measurements. The light reaching us from it now left it around 385 BCE. SIMBAD measures it at 2.6′ × 2.6′ on the sky — 8% of the full Moon's width. At that distance, that angle means it is roughly 2 light-years across. Framing uses its catalogue size instead: 2.0′.

Sources: AstroBrain catalogue; Acker A. et al. 1992, Strasbourg–ESO Catalogue of Galactic Planetary Nebulae, ESO, via CDS/VizieR V/84; Sharpless S. 1959, ApJS 4, 257, via CDS/VizieR VII/20; CDS/SIMBAD astronomical database, Strasbourg (SIMBAD record PN A66 71 · distance from 2010ApJ...714.1096S). Contains information from SIMBAD, which is made available here under the Open Database License (ODbL). Download the SIMBAD-derived data.

For scale

Full Moon · 31′Sharpless 116 · 2.6′
Angular size, as it would sit on your sky.

2 ly

across — 0× the distance from the Sun to its nearest neighbour star (4.37 ly).

The same patch of sky in visible light

  • Sky image

    Observatory photos and open-licence sky surveys.

    Credits on each image.

Neighbours in the sky

  • LBN 3620.3° away
  • LBN 3520.4° away
  • Sh2-1150.6° away
  • LBN 3580.6° away
  • LBN 3680.7° away
  • LBN 3720.8° away

Sky maths: apparent positions with refraction, one-minute steps; usable = full astronomical dark, at least 30° up and clear of your skyline. Survey images: CDS, Strasbourg (DSS2 and other surveys). Science: SIMBAD. The hours, heights and Moon on this page use no weather forecast; the rank is this target’s place in the Targets list, whose score also counts the cloud forecast when there is one.

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