In the constellation of Gemini where this PN is located a most difficult object for my 9" optics can be found, as it is rather dim at 13m0. Also the size of the socalled 'Peanut' - nebula appears at only 0.92 arc minutes on the sky and therefore longer focal length would make discovery of it's faint detail more easy. I tried to image luminance data with the 2" powermate barlow lens but this required way too long exp. time for the single frames. As seeing was exceptionally good that night I wanted to make sure to take advantage for both, luminance and color data to finish the project in the same night, as I cannot be certain to find decent conditions the following night at my observatory's location. This is why I used the one shot color CCD to gain the color data. R,G,B would have taken too much time. Nevertheless OSC CCD was able to gather some reasonable results.

After imaging this PN I intended to observe this little guy visually in my 20" f/3.7 newtonian, which interestingly enough appeared to be quite difficult to spot! The brightness is obviously so low that is very demanding to find this PN despite very good transparency and a dark background sky.

Though the PN is rather old counting around 10000 years, the central star, that shines at 14m8, is still quite hot, measuring some 100000 Kelvin. Discovered by W. Herschel in the 18th century, the specific 'bi-lobe' shape lead to 2 different NGC numbers (2371 + 72) in the first place, assuming it must be 2 different independent nebulas. In 1918 it's true nature was revealed by H.D. Curtis. According to Vorontsov-Velyaminov classification NGC 2371/2, also known as the 'Gemini-nebula', is cataloged as type IIIa+VI.