Two senile nearby planetary nebulae and the local planetary nebulae population.

Two large (diam. ≥ 13arcmin) nearby (D ≤ 0.33 kpc) planetary nebula (PN) were discovered by use of Kiso plates and POSS prints. Both are nebulae of very late evolutionary state with Hα surface brightnesses of ≥25.1 mag/arcsec², linear radii r ≥ 0.56 pc and electron densities n_e< 10 cm^-3. The expansion velocities are small, V_exp≤ 8 km s^-1 in [O III]. Also, the absolute magnitudes of the central stars are very small: one (M_v = +10.0) appears even to be of extremely low luminosity with log L/L_sun; ≤ 1.10. The detection of these nearby objects motivated the authors also to investigate the local PN population including all close PN discovered after the editing of the PK-catalogue. The total number of PN in the Galaxy is in excess of 10⁵ - the overwhelming majority obviously are planetary nebulae in very late stages of evolution.