New as of March 2009: See and bookmark the new version of PNIC with image thumbnails by Brent Miszalski and collaborators at www.aao.gov.au/local/www/brent/PNIC/ The server is in Australia, so it may be slowish to download.

New as of August 2008: The Hubble Planetary Nebula Image Catalogue by UW undergraduate students Kristina Pomeroy and Joel Leigh.

This catalogue is dedicated to the remarkable career of Donald E Osterbrock, a pioneer of observations of PNe and my mentor from 1973-1975. Please see this summary of Osterborck's professional contributions written for Nature (April 2007) by Joe Miller, past Director of Lick Observatory and a PhD student of Osterbrock's in the 1960s.

This image compilation is split into to two parts: emission-line images of standard PNe (about 700 images) and scattered-light images of pPNe (about 50 images, coming summer 2007). The images are taken from the web from many different sources. Therefore the quality of the images, the filters used to view them, and their selection biases are hugely heterogeneous.    PNe: There are standards for the definition of a PN, including shape and spectrum. Nearly all of the images of PNe are contained in the Strasbourg - ESO catalogue of galactic planetary nebulae. Part 1; Part 2; Garching: European Southern Observatory (Acker et al 1992), hereafter "PN Atlas" or "Acker Catalogue".   Please note that additional large-scale surveys to uncover many hundreds of additional PNe are underway. Outstanding examples are the AAO/UKST SuperCOSMOS Halpha survey, Parker et al, 2005, MNRAS, 362, 689 and INT Photometric Halpha Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane (IPHAS), Drew et al. 2005 MNRAS 362 753.    pPNe: The definition of a pPNe is very loosely defined for catalogue purposes. There is no authoritative list of bone fide members of the class. Sources of images. All of the images in this catalogue were downloaded from public material or constructed from FITS images available on the internet. Most of the images were obtained fromreliable sources or surveys, such as the IAC Morphological Cataog of Northern Galactic Planetary Nebulae (Manchado et al 1996, ESO publication) and supplemented by images wherever they can be located. I have endeavored to provide accurate attribution; however, this is not always possible. Many HST images are included whenever I could find them, and more will appear in summer 2007. A few images from amateur observers have been included when professional images are not available. Completeness. 1143 bona fide PNe are listed in the Acker Atlas. The compilation below includes about 2/3 of these and a few more that clearly belong to the class. I did not include emission line nebulae around symbiotic stars unless the objects are in the Acker catalogue as well. Completeness of the pPNe is impossible to assess. Many are faint, buried in extinction, and difficult to identify. In general, I accepted the word of the authors who claim that an object is a pPN. Additional HST images of pPNe can be found in the A HREF="http://archive.stsci.edu/hst/search.php">HST image archives, but as of this writing, I have made no effort to locate, download, or display all of them in any systematic way. File Designations. The file names include galactic coordinates and standard names taken from the Acker Atlas or SIMBAD. Blanks in the names have been expunged. Hence you can use your browser's "Find" command to locate objects either by their popular name or their Gal Coords. (Of course, you can always search for a fragment of a name, such as "7139" or "231.8".) When HST images are available the file name contains "hst" preceding the jpg extension. Similarly, images showing showing large halos generally contain the name "halo" in their catalogue names.

Contents: The images are in jpeg format, generally 492 pixels in width. Each image is labeled with names, galactic coordinates, positions (J2000 from SIMBAD), color information, image sources, and useful references (when I know them). When possible the images are displayed logarithmically (to tease our low features of low surface brightness). The images used in the red, green, and blue images planes are noted in each image. You may use modern image display programs (e.g., Photoshop) to view each image plane separately. In some cases the colors and surface brightnesses may deviate from logarithmic; if so, my intent was simply to show the complexity and extent of the morphological information in the images. North is up unless indicated otherwise. Suggestions for additions are welcome: send the URL to the electronic image to balick@astro.washington.edu. PLEASE BE SURE THAT ANY IMAGES TGHAT YOUR SEND TO ME ARE LABELED with name, galcoords (e.g., 056.7+08.9.ngc1234.o3.fits) and the names of the filter or emission lines in each color. Also, please note the sources of the image and, if possible, pointers to published papers in which the images appear. For the Future. This version of the catalogue is the first, and it is obviously incomplete. Two compilations of with cimplementary H_2 images for PNe are: Kastner, J.H.; Weintraub, D.A.; Gatley, I.; Merrill, K. M.; Probst, R.G. 1996 ApJ, 462, 777 and Guerrero, M. A.; Villaver, E.; Manchado, A.; Garcia-Lario, P.; Prada, F. 2000 ApJS, 127, 125. More will come. Restrictions. None are intended. I certainly do NOT impose any restrictions on the use of the images - I found all of them in the public domain and/or received permission of the authors. However, please do NOT publish these images without the direct permission of the authors. Images made with public facilities should follow their respective attribution and acknowledgment rules. Acknowledgments: I appreciate the cooperation of them many people who contributed images, especially those who were not consulted ahead of time. Special thanks to Romano Corradi and Arturo Manchado for making their images freely available. Adobe Photoshop 8.0 was used to read, process, align, and display the images. Thanks to ESA/ESO/NASA for the "FITS Liberator 2" plugin that reads FITS images directly into Photoshop. Some of the data presented in this catalogue were obtained from the Multimission Archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute (MAST). STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. Support for MAST for non-HST data is provided by the NASA Office of Space Science via grant NAG5-7584 and by other grants and contracts. Some of the images were obtained from the NOAO Science Archive. NOAO is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc. under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation.

The Image Catalogue of Planetary Nebulae