Finders for "Southerly Planetary Nebulae"

The June 2021 issue of Sky & Telescope features an observing article by Don Ferguson on planetary nebulae that he was able to observe from his backyard in Houston, Texas. These are low-declination objects, and many were inaccessible to him until a neighbor chopped down a tree.

One night out with the telescope in his backyward, Don noticed that he could track objects through this gap in the foliage. He nicknamed this opening a sendero, after the colloquial name Texan pipeline workers gave to corridors cleared through the brush for the laying down of the lines. Don realized that he could track objects up and down by right ascension and timed his observations for when they appeared in the sendero. This made more sense to him for his particular situation than sticking to a specific constellation, for example, or working east to west. Maybe if your view is similarly impeded, you can find your own sendero.

Below we've included the close-up finders for the 16 targets covered in the article in order of appearance. They're all Digitized Sky Survey images , 40′ × 40′ in size. Select stars are labeled along with their magnitudes (without decimal points).