IC 2149 is a little PN in Auriga; altough it has a sufficiently high brightness it's neglected by skygazers and cannot boast a good number of images, probably because of its angular dimension. It reveals a peculiar shape in medium aperture telescopes, and shows its typical "Red Sword" shape, from wich it's nicknamed, elongated on E-W direction, a bit brighter on the E side, with a bright central star. Its brightness is not homogeneous: infact, it looks like a sword just because it's brighter on one side. We are in front of a bipolar-toroid nebula seen edged-on, so that we can see the equatorial toroid (the fusiform shape). Lobes are very hard to catch also in photography because they're very rarefied. Recently this nebula has been object of many studies that confirmed a bipolar structure with the central toroid, and probably has been found the evidence of an elliptic shell that wraps the toroid itself.
Interesting level: **** |
