Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Canis Major (CMa)  ·  Contains:  IC 468  ·  NGC 2359
Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
NGC 2359 (Thor's Helmet or Duck nebula), Herwig Peresson
NGC 2359 (Thor's Helmet or Duck nebula)
Powered byPixInsight

NGC 2359 (Thor's Helmet or Duck nebula)

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
NGC 2359 (Thor's Helmet or Duck nebula), Herwig Peresson
NGC 2359 (Thor's Helmet or Duck nebula)
Powered byPixInsight

NGC 2359 (Thor's Helmet or Duck nebula)

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

Since 2 years I tried to catch enough light frames from my site in Vienna of this attractive winter object, which is located relatively low in the constellation Canis Major.

This is a Ha and [OIII] narrowband bi-color image combined with RGB stars. Due to always poor seeing conditions and narrow imaging time, I changed to 2x2 binning. Processed in Pixinsight & Photoshop.

Object description from Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_2359

NGC 2359 (also known as Thor's Helmet) is an emission nebula in the constellation Canis Major. The nebula is approximately 12,000 light years away and 30 light years in size. The central star is the Wolf-Rayet star WR7, an extremely hot star thought to be in a brief pre-supernova stage of evolution. It is similar in nature to the Bubble Nebula, but interactions with a nearby large molecular cloud are thought to have contributed to the more complex shape and curved bow-shock structure of Thor's Helmet.

It is also catalogued as Sharpless 2-298 and Gum 4.

The nebula has an overall bubble shape, but with complex filamentary structures. The nebula contains several hundred solar masses of ionised material, plus several thousand more of unionised gas. It is largely interstellar material swept up by winds from the central star, although some material does appear to be enriched with the products of fusion and is likely to come directly from the star. The expansion rate of different portions of the nebula varies from 10km/s to at least 30km/s, leading to age estimates of 78,500 - 236,000 years.

Comments

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

NGC 2359 (Thor's Helmet or Duck nebula), Herwig Peresson