Stellar Shot of the Week
This surreal shot of Thor’s Helmet (NGC 2359) was taken by Frank Dibbell with his SVX140T and processed by Tony Hallas.
This nebula is located 11,960 light-years away from Earth in Canis Major. It has a bubble shape with complex filamentary structures. The nebula houses several hundred solar masses of ionized material, as well as several thousand more of unionized gas. While most of it is interstellar material being swept up by winds from the central star (WR7), some of it appears to be enriched with products of fusion, likely coming directly from the star itself.
According to Frank and Tony: NGC 2359 RGB + H-a + OIII… commonly known as “Thor’s Helmet” was taken with a stellarvue SVX140mm f-7 refractor. The camera was a ZWO ASI2600MM… we used a 10 Micron mount. This was taken in New Mexico on the Ed Thomas hosting facility DSP Remote during dark of the moon in January 2025. RGB was 16 X 600 seconds each color. H-a was 20 X 1200 seconds, the OIII was 20 X 1200 seconds. We used Chroma filters. Credit should be given to Team Dibbell - Hallas.
Other Designations: NGC 2359, GUM 4, LBN 227.66-00.09, Sh2-298, GRS 227.80-00.20, LBN 1041, RCW 5.
Details:
Telescope: SVX140T
Camera: ZWO ASI2600MM Pro
Mount: 10 Micron AZ1000 HPS
Software:
- Adobe Photoshop
- Auriga Imaging Registar
- CCDWare CCDStack
- Diffraction Limited MaxIm DL
- Topaz Labs Topaz AI
References:
Wikipedia contributors. (2024, July 18). NGC 2359. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_2359
Thor’s Helmet - AstroBin. (n.d.). AstroBin. https://app.astrobin.com/u/tonyhallas?i=1hars6
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