I like the names Eskimo Nebula, Sombrero Nebula and Witch Head Nebula these are stereotypical thus easily recognizable names that children and anyone looking at space can understand not just space nerds saying hey thats NGC 2392 or look at those NGC 4567 and NGC 4568.
I think the point with Eskimo Nebula, though, is that you shouldn't look at a shape like that and think "this is what an Eskimo looks like." And going forward, children aren't going to be shown cartoons of furry-hooded little people and told "this is an Eskimo," just like we don't circulate red-lipped blackfaced clown cartoons, either, even though children loved them in their day and many formed attachments to those images without knowingly connecting them to anything racial at all. So if you had a "Pickaninny Nebula" now, most people wouldn't even know what that was supposed to refer to, and realistically "Eskimo" is going to be like that going forward which means in addition to being hurtful it's not going to be helpful from an identification standpoint.
Again it's like any other iconic ethnic/racial caricature - when you distill an entire people down to a cartoonish surface characteristic, you might not be doing it with ill intent but you're enshrining something that is harmful, and if you perpetuate that cultural iconography, you end up participating in that harm. If the Sombrero Nebula were called the Beaner Nebula or even just the Mexican Nebula, this would be a problem, too.
I don't think this is the kind of problem which carries an equal amount of weight at all levels and in all places, but an institution like NASA, which due to the nature of its work, kind of ends up representing all of humanity regardless of national origin, probably ought to avoid enshrining racial and ethnic caricatures in the
very stars themselves.
