LDN1251

About This Image

Sometimes I wonder how astronomical targets get their coloquial names. This one is LDN 1251 it is known colloquially as the Rotten Fish Nebula. Perhaps a bit on what LDN 1251 means: LDN stands for Lynds' Dark Nebula. This catalogue was assembled by the American astronomer Beverly Turner Lynds in 1962 while she was a professor at the University of Arizona and an Astronomer at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. The catalogue was assembled from her visual inspection of Palomar Schmidt photographs produced from the 48" telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego California. Lynds spent countless hours tracing the outlines of all the dark nebulae she could see on the photographic plates onto tracing paper, recording their coordinates, measuring their areas with a calibrated planimeter, and estimating their darkness on a scale of 1 to 6. She published her catalog of 1802 dark nebulae in the Astrophysical Journal in 1962. It is now regarded as a landmark catalog on par with the Messier, New General, Index, and Sharpless catalogs, and currently has nearly 1,000 citations in the scientific literature. She subsequently repeated this work to catalog known and unknown emission and reflection nebulae — but not planetary nebulae — and supernova remnants, publishing her catalog of bright nebulae in the Astrophysical Journal in 1965.