Ancient ‘ghost’ planetary nebulae discovered with amateur telescopes

¹ Asociación Astronómica AstroHenares, Manuel Azaña, s/n, Coslada, Spain
² Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, 38205 La Laguna, Spain
³ Departamento de Astrofísica, Universidad de La Laguna, 38206 La Laguna, Spain
⁴ Observatorio Astronómico Nacional (OAN-IGN), Alfonso XII, 3, 28014, Madrid, Spain
⁵ Zentrum für Astronomie der Universität Heidelberg, Landessternwarte, Königstuhl 12, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany

^★ Corresponding author: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Received: 17 February 2026
Accepted: 20 April 2026

Abstract

As planetary nebulae evolve, they fade and dissipate into the surrounding interstellar medium, which makes them harder to detect. Modern, advanced amateur equipment can help to uncover this hidden population of ancient ‘ghost’ planetary nebulae. Via careful processing of long-integration, narrow-band imagery with modest aperture telescopes at a dark-sky site, we detected three new candidate planetary nebulae (JAM 2, JAM 3, and JAM 4). Each measures several arcminutes across with [O III] surface brightnesses of order 30 mag arcsec⁻². For each nebula, we identify a candidate central star, the parallaxes of which lead to nebular age estimates in the range 50–100 thousand years. The candidate central star of JAM 2 also shows indications of photometric variability, potentially due to spots on the stellar surface.