Mike's Mathom Collection - NGC 1514

I first encountered the planetary nebula NGC 1514 while camping in the Anza-Borrego Desert around New Years 2000. (Yes, we were avoiding the Y2K apocalypse.) I had been looking at the California Nebula in the constellation Taurus with my 10′′ Dobsonian telescope, then I decided to just start randomly scanning the sky nearby. Into my field of view popped three nearly equally bright stars in a not-quite-straight line, but the middle star had a fuzzy halo around it, something like the very fine drawing by Richard Orr at right. At first I thought I was just tired, or maybe that the optics were fogging, but the outer stars were sharp points, and nothing changed as I moved them around the field. Later I went back to my star charts and found that I had “discovered” NGC 1514, a planetary nebula that was originally discovered by Sir William Herschel in November 1790. This nebula has the distinction of convincing Herschel in his 1791 paper that there could be “shining fluids” in space. Until then, astronomers believed that the fuzzy wisps they had been seeing were likely just clusters of faint stars that would eventually be resolved into individual stars when observed with bigger and better telescopes; this had been the case for many previously observed nebulae like open clusters, globular clusters, and galaxies. NGC 1514 gave the first convincing proof that truly gaseous nebulae (as we understand them now) existed.

In 2010, while sifting through some early WISE data looking for potentially pretty pictures, I decided to look up NGC 1514 just to see what it was like in the infrared. The symmetric rings visible in the infrared image (right) took me completely by surprise, since there is no evidence of them whatsoever at visible wavelengths (left). After a flurry of emails with some of the other WISE science team members and the PI, I wrote up a little paper in the Astronomical Journal and JPL ran a press release.

Many news and science blog sites picked up the story. Phil Plait had a very well done writeup in the Bad Astronomy Newsletter/Blog (dead original link, screen grab), but my absolute favorite is a blog entry at the Monterey Bay Aquarium (dead original link, screen grab). That one is really worth the read.

Fast forward 13 years. Because of my work on MIRI, I was granted a bit of guaranteed observing time with which I could observe whatever I wanted (within reason). Of course, I had to observe NGC 1514 with MIRI, so in the fall of 2023, JWST was pointed at it and my observing plan was executed. It took me a little while, but a new paper was published in the Astronomical Journal and the main image was released on April 15, 2025 (Tax Day!) by the Space Telescope Science Institute (who operate JWST along with the Hubble Space Telescope and others).

Again there was lots of interest amongst the news and science blogs sites. Phil Plait picked it up again, as did an Ars Technica opinion piece to address whether JWST was worth all the expense; they concluded “Yes!” but I shudder to think that my little nebula picture was the basis for that post. I haven't yet found any that were quite so poetic as the 2010 Monterey Bay Aquarium piece; however, I suppose that even one such tribute is more than one can rightly expect in a career.

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Last update: 2025-04-21