Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Canis Major (CMa)  ·  Contains:  NGC 2359
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Thor's Helmet (NGC 2359), Aaron H.
Thor's Helmet (NGC 2359)
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Thor's Helmet (NGC 2359)

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Thor's Helmet (NGC 2359), Aaron H.
Thor's Helmet (NGC 2359)
Powered byPixInsight

Thor's Helmet (NGC 2359)

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Description

Clear nights have been a rarity here over the past year, but in mid-January the clouds broke, clear weather was forecast, and I set to dusting off my gear ready for imaging. I decided to draw up a shortlist of possible targets and let my wife pick what we'd tackle next. She immediately gravitated to NGC 2359 (Thor's Helmet), loving the structure of it, and the cool colours that tend to arise from a HOO processing of the target.

By the time I set up my gear and remembered how to use it, I managed a couple of hours imaging on the first night. Then clouds rolled back in and it was another week before I could acquire a few more hours of data. My wife was excited to see the result, so I called it done there and processed it.

I initially processed the data with Siril and we were both happy with the result. However, I've started using PixInsight recently, and have seen noticeably sharper results from my colour camera data when performing a CFA drizzle (even at 1x). So, for my new Astrobin account, I decided to reprocess and see if this would help here too. It did. I saw an immediate improvement in contrast and detail.

Imaging was done with my larger Newt, using an ALP-T filter and a colour camera.

Overall, I'm happy with the detail I achieved on this one for such a short integration time. It's enough to convince me to hold out a bit longer before upgrading to a mono camera.

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Thor's Helmet (NGC 2359), Aaron H.