The target here is a "planetary nebula" catalogued as IC1295; a planetary nebula is a shell of material blown away from a star following a nova or supernova. This target is excessively ambitious - it's a magnitude 12.7 nebula 4,700 light years away, a nd it's tiny - it's 1.5 arcseconds across and it covers just 44 x 37 pixels on a primary image frame. This is seeing what the limits of my 90mm refractor are.

"Magnitude" is an arcane measure of star brightness. It was invented by the Greeks a long time ago. They called the brightest star they could see Magnitude 1; stars a bit dimmer were called Magnitude 2, and so on. We still do this. However, in the 19th century astronomers put the measure on a mathematical footing; they said that a 5th magnitude star is a hundred times brighter than a first magnitude star. This make magnitude a logarithmic scale counting in base 2.5119 - and we still do this too. The Babylonians counted in base 60 and we continue to count the hours and the degrees in a circle that way, so counting in base 2.5119 is only a little more ridiculous - but it works. We now measure magnitude to 4 decimal places using photometry.

On a linear scale, IC1296 is 120,000 times dimmer than a first magnitude star such as Spica, the brightest star in the constellation Virgo.

The result isn't impressive, but it wasn't expected to be. IC1295 shows up as a distinctly blue blob and even a little detail can be discerned. The best image of IC1295 that I could find was captured by the European Southern Observatory, a 1.3 billion euro testament to big physics. The picture is definitely a better than mine, but it isn't 1.3 billion euros better.

Also in the frame is a small globular cluster, IC 6712.

For interest I've processes a background image showing how strongly coloured some star are.