NGC 6543

Planetary Nebula NGC 6543

(= H IV.37

= Caldwell 6)

in Draco

The Cat Eye Nebula

Right Ascension	17 : 58.6 (h:m)
Declination	+66 : 38 (deg:m)
Distance	3.6 (kly)
Visual Brightness	8.1 (mag)
Apparent Dimension	0.3/5.8 (arc min)

This magnificient planetary is another prominent northern object missed by

Charles Messier and discovered by

William Herschel.

The Cat Eye nebula was the first planetary which was spectroscopically

investigated and displayed its typical (and peculiar) line spectrum, by

the English amatuer astronomer William Huggins, published originally

in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (London)

Vol. 145, p. 437, in 1864 (the same volume where John Herschel published

his General Catalog, GC of 5079 entries for deep sky objects).

NGC 6543 is situated almost exactly in the direction of the North Ecliptic

Pole. This means that the normal vector of Earth’s orbital plane (and also

the total angular momentum vector of our solar system) points to a direction

very close to this nebula, and that those diagrams of planetary orbits in the

yearbooks and magazines represent the view of them from this planetary :).

Our image was obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Bill Arnett‘s Cateye Nebula NGC 6543

photo page,

info page.

In the SAC 110 best NGC object list.

No. 89 in the RASC Finest NGC Objects list.

The ISO infrared space telescope has investigated the Cat Eye nebula

in the infrared light.

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Hartmut Frommert

([email protected])

Christine Kronberg

([email protected])

Last Modification: 29 Mar 1998, 12:20 MET