20220308 - NGC 2359 Thor’s Tiny Tinpan - The return of Wickie the Viking

What’s in the picture(s) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_2359
Quote: “NGC 2359 (also known as Thor's Helmet) is an emission nebula[3] in the constellation Canis Major. The nebula is approximately 3,670 parsecs (11.96 thousand light years) away and 30 light-years in size. The central star is the Wolf-Rayet starWR7, 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”

What was the experience
After I had captured the Seagull Nebula, quite low to the horizon, I wanted to see if anything lower would be possible as well: Thor’s Helmet. Slightly lower, hardly reaching 25degrees (well below the 30degrees comfort zone), even more obscured by the trees and the neighbouring floodlight. Only visible for less than an hour a night from my garden, I even had to wait before it cleared the branches of the tree while dropping lower, gradually building up the integration time over multiple nights, using  the ‘smaller’ TS94, giving me a wide-field view, cropped to 3k x 2k 

A bit of an experiment with the processing, I moved away from my standard workflow for OSC images, but split the channels of the L-Enhance right from the start and processed this as I would a mono-capture, using the HOO-palette, preserving the outflow of the nebulosity across the star-field. As always, I keep the RA and Dec on ;y image aligned with the X and Y axis 😉

How it was done
Scope: TS94 APO (FL 414mm)
Mount: EQ6-R Pro
Camera: ASI2600MC Pro
Photons: 20220227-0308 L-Enhance 180s 59x 2:57
Processing: PixInsight (Mac)

What have I learned from this
With some patience, good weather and clear (ground-)air, a capture of a low flying DSO might be possible, although it is slightly impacting the quality of the image.
With the processing experience gained, finally daring to move away from a ‘standard’ OSC workflow and transgressing into my mono-workflow with the separate channels. Happy with this ... for now 😎

Clear Skies everybody! 🤩✨🔭

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