NGC 2359, also called Thor’s Helmet, is an emission nebula in the constellation of Canis Major; the same constellation that has the brightest star in the Earth’s night sky -- Sirius. Much like the God of Thunder himself, the central Wolf-Rayet star WR7 is in a violently pre-Supernova stage that is thought to have contributed to the complex shape and curved bow-shock of the helmet-like nebular structures.
Impressed by
@Bill Long - Dark Matters Astrophotography's data of this object with his CDK14 and the IMX461 sensor on his Moravian C5A-100M, I wanted to capture this object with my setup (which has the same scope but lacks the grandeur of that ginormous sensor). This image took just around 8 hours of data in Hydrogen-Alpha and Oxygen-III, and is one of my less expansive projects still yielding very interesting results. I would have loved to get more data on this object, however it's already quite low in the sky, and the lack of clear skies meant this is about as much as I could get. I also didn't have time to capture separate RGB stars, so it took some interesting processing to get properly colored stars with just those two narrowband wavelengths of light.
Comments