A Little Gassy

In a nutshell, this is why I love Wired so much.  They cover random geekery like this.

Exhaled by a dying star, the newly-discovered planetary nebula, Kronberger 61, is named for its finder: Austrian Matthias Kronberger, member of the amateur astronomy group Deep Sky Hunters.

Kronberger found the luminous bubble by searching a section of sky near the northern constellation Cygnus with Digitized Sky Survey data. This sliver of the sky is also covered by Kepler, NASA’s space telescope charged with finding habitable planets.

A new planetary nebula is a rare and valuable find. Without amateur help the discovery “would probably not have been made before the end of the Kepler mission,” said George Jacoby, a Kepler astronomer who requested the help of Deep Sky Hunters, in a press release.