In ancient times*, there lived a lanky blonde lad called Thor who used to get picked on a bit. Folks thought he looked like a dropped chip. Because in ancient times people weren't always very nice, they'd call Thor names like "Chippy", "Chipper" and "Chipmeister". He did not like this one bit, but the worst thing was they would get the seagulls to swoop him and pinch his lunch money.

One day, Thor had had enough and wandered off, stumbling across a big old hammer. Since no one was using it, he picked it up and swung it around a bit to deal with his frustration. He realised he could use it to fight evil, and, using whatever money the seagulls hadn't flown off with, he bought a shiny costume and left town to fight crime.

When word got back to the people of Thor's heroics, they felt guilty and foolish for scaring off a talented peacekeeper. They implored the Gods to create a signal large enough to be noticed from the Rainbow Bridge, so that Chipp- they meant Thor - might return. The gods decided to keep the peace so they erected a very large nebula in Canis Major, alongside a smaller rendition of Thor's Helmet, In honour of him.

The Gods' crafty arrangement shows that: even if a person starts out looking like a chip dropped by a space seagull, the meek can become mighty: frightening off the largest and faintest of nebulae simply by pointing the sharp-looking bits of their helmet at it.

The Gods informed the people that (a) they had decided to make Thor a God, by the way, and (b) whilst they had created the nebulae, the people would never see them because they were too faint and no one had invented telescopes yet. (The Gods did not want to reinforce crappy behaviour.) These days, people can remember this lesson by pointing a Nikon full frame DSLR connected to a Sigma 150-600mm (set at 250mm, f5.6) just underneath Sirius, and collecting about 30 x 300 second exposures at ISO 1600. They can autoguide this image train on a Skywatcher EQ6R Pro.

If they play their cards right in post-processing they don't need to use darks or flats (but they probably should have).

Clear skies✌

*not really, this is all made up