Program: GN-2020A-Q-231

For decades, the brightest planetary nebulae (PNe) observed in old stellar populations have been known to be too bright to be explained by conventional models of stellar evolution. Recent models have come close to producing these brightest PNe from the low-mass progenitors of old populations. However, the models are still very far from agreement when the effects of extinction are considered. We propose to use the GMOS spectrograph on Gemini-N to measure the Balmer decrements and thus the true de-reddened luminosities of the brightest PNe in NGC 3379, the nearest normal giant elliptical with an unambiguously old (~10 Gyr) stellar population. Deriving the true luminosities of these brightest PNe will provide a crucial constraint to be met by future theoretical models.