A glowing cloud in a telescope looks like a wisp of fog about to dissipate. Planetary nebulae are gas shells cast off by dying stars. Young nebulae are bright and compact, but as they age, they expand, cool, and become increasingly transparent until they vanish into the interstellar medium.
Amateur astronomers have managed to catch three such 'ghosts.' Using small telescopes with narrowband filters and very long exposures under dark rural skies, they photographed barely visible clouds. Each spans several times the size of the full Moon on the sky, yet shines so faintly that the eye would not see it even through the most powerful amateur telescope. Only stacking hundreds of frames revealed these nebulae.
The age of the finds is estimated at 50–100 thousand years — a blink of an eye by stellar standards, but for a planetary nebula, it's deep old age. In one of them, JAM 2, they found a star whose brightness varies slightly. Possibly, dark spots on its surface, like sunspots, are periodically turned toward us as the star rotates.
In this way, amateur telescopes help us peer into the distant past of stars — where professional sky surveys often don't reach due to lack of time.
Planetary nebulae have nothing to do with planets: in old telescopes they looked like disks resembling distant planets, hence the name.