A dusty nebula around the luminous blue variable candidate HD 168625

On the basis of narrow-band visible and near-infrared imagery as well as high-resolution spectroscopy, we report the discovery of a new LBV-type nebula around the B supergiant HD 168625. We find that it essentially consists of a dusty expanding shell from which seems to emerge a bipolar emission nebula, the whole embedded in a reflection nebulosity. The inner shell is stratified: the continuum emission arises beyond the ionized gas, and is possibly due to scattering of stellar light by large dust grains or to non-equilibrium dust emission. The unexpected presence of unidentified infrared emission bands (UIRs) in the spectrum of this object is also discussed. We finally report the non-detection of a comparable nebula around the nearby LBV HD 168607.