[en] NGC 6302 is one of the highest ionization planetary nebulae (PNe) known and shows emission from species with ionization potential > 300 eV. The temperature of the central star must be > 200,000 K to photoionize the nebula, and has been suggested to be up to ∼400,000 K. On account of the dense dust and molecular disk, the central star has not convincingly been directly imaged until now. NGC 6302 was imaged in six narrowband filters by Wide Field Camera 3 on the Hubble Space Telescope as part of the Servicing Mission 4 Early Release Observations. The central star is directly detected for the first time, and is situated at the nebula center on the foreground side of the tilted equatorial disk. The magnitudes of the central star have been reliably measured in two filters (F469N and F673N). Assuming a hot blackbody, the reddening has been measured from the (4688-6766 A) color and a value of c = 3.1, A_v = 6.6 mag determined. A G-K main-sequence binary companion can be excluded. The position of the star on the H-R diagram suggests a fairly massive PN central star of about 0.64 M _sun close to the white dwarf cooling track. A fit to the evolutionary tracks for (T, L, t) = (200,000 K, 2000 L _sun, 2200 yr), where t is the nebular age, is obtained; however, the luminosity and temperature remain uncertain. The model tracks predict that the star is rapidly evolving, and fading at a rate of almost 1% per year. Future observations could test this prediction.

[en] Deep ACS slitless grism observations and identification of stellar sources are presented within the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey North and South fields which were obtained in the Probing Evolution And Reionization Spectroscopically (PEARS) program. It is demonstrated that even low-resolution spectra can be a very powerful means of identifying stars in the field, especially low-mass stars with stellar types M0 and later. The PEARS fields lay within the larger GOODS fields, and we used new, deeper images to further refine the selection of stars in the PEARS field, down to a magnitude of z ₈₅₀ = 25 using a newly developed stellarity parameter. The total number of stars with reliable spectroscopic and morphological identification was 95 and 108 in the north and south fields, respectively. The sample of spectroscopically identified stars allows constraints to be set on the thickness of the Galactic thin disk as well as contributions from a thick disk and a halo component. We derive a thin disk scale height, as traced by the population of M4-M9 dwarfs along two independent lines of sight, of h _thin = 370⁺⁶⁰_-65 pc. When including the more massive M0-M4 dwarf population, we derive h _thin = 300 ± 70 pc. In both cases, we observe that we must include a combination of thick and halo components in our models in order to account for the observed numbers of faint dwarfs. The required thick disk scale height is typically h _thick = 1000 pc and the acceptable relative stellar densities of the thin disk to thick disk and the thin disk to halo components are in the range of 0.00025 < f _halo < 0.0005 and 0.05 < f _thick < 0.08 and are somewhat dependent on whether the more massive M0-M4 dwarfs are included in our sample.