Chemical abundances of planetary nebulae towards the Galactic anticenter

Abstract

In this paper we report new observations and derive chemical abundances for a sample of 26 planetary nebulae (PN) located in the anticenter direction. Most of these nebulae are far away objects, located at Galactocentric distances greater than about 8 kpc, so that they are particularly useful for the determination of the radial gradients at large distances from the galactic center. A comparison of the present results with previously determined abundances suggests that the radial abundance gradients flatten out at distances larger than about 10 kpc from the center.