Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Canis Major (CMa)  ·  Contains:  IC 468  ·  NGC 2359  ·  Sh2-298
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Thor’s Helmet (NGC 2359), Gary Lopez
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Thor’s Helmet (NGC 2359)

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Thor’s Helmet (NGC 2359), Gary Lopez
Powered byPixInsight

Thor’s Helmet (NGC 2359)

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Description

About 12,000 light years away, in the constellation Canis Major, is an emission nebula popularly known as Thor’s Helmet. The center of the nebula is roughly spherical, with extending filamentous structures of gas and dust that may have been the result of interaction with a nearby molecular cloud. In the middle of the object is the Wolf-Raynet star, WR7, a very hot star that may be nearing supernova.

It was a slog to gather enough data to make this image. Frequent overcast, fog, and poor seeing, coupled with this object’s location low on the horizon, resulted in many short (2-3 hours) unproductive data gathering sessions. All together I was only able to collected about 30 hours of data over a two month stretch. Of those data, I used about 13 hours (with HFR <3.0) for color mapping, and 8.4 hours of better quality data (HFR <2.6) to create a master luminance. Version F is an HOO rendition where I used a color palette that better reveals the gradients in OIII and Ha mixtures. The second rendition, Version B, use a more traditional HOO color palette.

Comments

Revisions

    Thor’s Helmet (NGC 2359), Gary Lopez
    Original
    Thor’s Helmet (NGC 2359), Gary Lopez
    B
    Thor’s Helmet (NGC 2359), Gary Lopez
    C
    Thor’s Helmet (NGC 2359), Gary Lopez
    D
    Thor’s Helmet (NGC 2359), Gary Lopez
    E
  • Final
    Thor’s Helmet (NGC 2359), Gary Lopez
    F

B

Description: Traditional HOO color palette

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C

Description: Bit of tweaking of star color

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D

Description: Yet another star tweak.

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E

Description: Adjusted the stretch to improve contrast and color density

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F

Description: Yet another tweak of the star color (perceptible to absolutely nobody but me).

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Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

Thor’s Helmet (NGC 2359), Gary Lopez