NGC 2359, Thor's Helmet (Niall MacNeill)

Celestial hemisphere: Southern · Constellation: Canis Major (CMa) · Contains: HD56594 · HD56595 · HD57008 · HD57027 · HD57057 · HD57083 · IC 468 · LBN 1040 · LBN 1041 · NGC 2359 · Sh2-298

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NGC 2359, Thor's Helmet

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NGC 2359, Thor's Helmet

With some clear nights during the new Moon period these last couple of months I was able to complete the data acquisition for the amazing Thor's Helmet.

It is an emission nebula in the constellation Canis Major. You can see from the LRGB image that it is located in a rich star field, in fact right in the middle of the Milky Way. 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. At the estimated distance, this star is calculated to be 229,000 times brighter than the Sun, 13 times more massive, and 1.26 times larger with a surface temperature of 112,200 K.
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. I think you'll agree the structure is striking. 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 10 km/s to at least 30 km/s, leading to age estimates of 78,500 - 236,000 years. This includes abridged notes from Wikipedia.

It looks more like an octopus to me than Thor's Helmet. What do you think? :-D

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7403594
PixInsight job	W5197V3VX50YM04TEUMK9EA4POBE6DTK
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	07h18m35s.531
RA (top/left)	07h17m03s.641
RA (top/right)	07h20m06s.520
RA (bottom/right)	07h20m07s.283
RA (bottom/left)	07h17m04s.786

Dec (center)	-13°12′27″.86
Dec (top/left)	-13°34′34″.66
Dec (top/right)	-13°34′48″.10
Dec (bottom/right)	-12°50′20″.36
Dec (bottom/left)	-12°50′05″.20

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NGC 2359, Thor's Helmet

NGC 2359, Thor's Helmet

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NGC 2359, Thor's Helmet

NGC 2359, Thor's Helmet

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