On the same night I observed M63 (the 7th April 2026) and before I had my meltdown with the BAA, I had another go at the Deep Sky Section's Object of Interest. For April, this was NGC 4361 which is a planetary nebula in the constellation of Corvus (the crow). This is quite a difficult object to observe because Corvus only scrapes the horizon from our latitudes in the UK. For the first part of my observation (77x15s) I used the Astro filter in the Dwarf 3 (first frame was at 23:37 BST and the last at 00:02 on the 8th). Even then, I was looking through the branches of my neighbour's apple tree! For the second part (240x15s) I used the Duo-Band filter (first frame 00:04 BST and the last 01:18). This was more successful as by then Corvus had moved into uncluttered field of view.
To combine the results I used the majority of the second observation. Then for a small section around the nebula I replaced it with the combined results added together 50:50. Here is the result:-
The nebula is the small bluish object in the centre of the frame (click on the image to get a better view). Here is a crop of the image:-
I am quite pleased with the result. I think the nebula gets its name because it looks like an old-fashioned lawn sprinkler - one which had two arms that were rotated by the pressure of the water. If you can imagine looking down on such a sprinkler from above I think the two arms are at the 11 o'clock and 5 o'clock positions (though the one at the 5 o'clock is more obvious).
All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2026
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