Imaging of Magellanic Cloud Planetary Nebulae by the Hubble Space Telescope

Abstract

We have obtained Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Planetary Camera (PC) images of a number of Magellanic Cloud planetary nebulae. The objects, except for SMP 83 were observed as part of the Cycle I GO program. The observations were made in the [O III] λ5007Å line. The object SMP 83, was observed as part of the GTO program, and in this case observations were also made in the Hα line using the F650N filter. In order to characterise the point spread function, a star was placed at the same point on the chip as the PN. This allowed us to determine the diameters of barely resolved PN in an accurate manner, by convolving the PSF with a function until it matched the appearance of the PN image. The results are given in Table 1.