Thors Helmet NGC 2359

[tornado33]

Hi everyone.
Earlier thisevening I captured Thors helmet NGC 2359. Everything seemed to be working well, so I went for a full 45 mins imaging time.
3 x 15 mins ISO 200, modded 350D, Baader UHCS filter and MPCC
10 inch F5.6 manually guided. Taken from light polluted Newcastle.
Dark subtracted and stacked in Iris, finished off (hurriedly) with Photoshop. Ive dreampt of capturing this hard to get object :)
Scott

[RB]

Fantastic image Scott, well done.
45 min total - manually guided :eyepop:
Beautiful colours and well defined shape.

Congrats.

[tornado33]

Thanks, I am stoked I got it :)
now the southerly is roaring through, Im glad I set up the scope before it was dark, finding Thors helmet was fun though, no chance of seeing it in viewfinder, had to star hop to location shown by Star Atlas pro, then take a few short images to verify I was on it.
Scott

[iceman]

Wow, that's beautiful. Incredible detail.

[h0ughy]

Amazing Scott, absolutely amazing!!

[tornado33]

Thanks :)
This is why I live astrophotography, imaging something so faint I cant even see it in the viewfinder, yet having it appear with all its colours as I process the image :)
Scott

[tornado33]

Ive just uploaded a larger version to my ISP webspace
http://www.users.on.net/~josiah/mod350d/thors%20helmetsmall.jpg
enjoy
Scott

[Striker]

Nice scott.

I feel the same way.....I cant see anything from home and imaging bring out so much detail and colour..what a great hobby when the skies are clear.

45 minutes of manual guiding nice effort.

[avandonk]

Thats a great effort and result Scott. I have only seen pictures of this object taken with much larger optics and cooled CCD's (and some were not as good!). Must try and get a wide field of this region and see what else is around and if Thors Helmet even shows up.

My interest in wide fields is exactly the same as all previous reasons, I get to see in colour objects that are only dimly visible from my light polluted suburban skies.

Again, a very nice image from Scott.

Bert

[EzyStyles]

nice image scott! impressive.

[ving]

tis the mighty winged helm!
well done :)

[PhotonCollector]

That's fantastic Scott,

Looks like you have guiding and focus spot-on! I've imaged this object a few times with my standard 300D camera, but was never able to capture the red parts of the nebula with the H-alpha blocking filter (obviously).

There's not many examples of Wolf-Rayet stars interacting with surrounding nebula, but you've captured the perfect one here, welll done.

Paul Mayo

[Raydar]

Nice shot mate :)

[tornado33]

Thanks :)
Yes the modded camera makes stuff like this possible. Such an exotic object too, as you say hot wolf rayet stars with multicoloured nebulosity are not common.
before starting and while still light I did some drift aligning, and tweaked theAzimuth (scope was still slowly drifting north meaning I had to rotate the azimuth a fraction of a degree east, a fraction of a turn of the adjustment knobs). I then let it track and no drift at all over several minutes, which is good enough, on top of that a fairly bright guidestar was visible close to the inner limit of my guider (where the guidestar was closer to the axis and therefore less comatic) making guiding nice and easy. What I also did was remove the plastic worm wheel and clean it with detergent as dirt was visible in the teeth, removing that and spraying it lightly with WD40 made a difference in tracking, the star would sit nice and still requiring only gentle adjustments of tracking speed.

Note: finding Thors Helmet with Star Atlas pro was easy, it was right where S.A.P. showed it to be, once I had located the stars in the field I was home and hosed. The red rectangle is my image field, and I was able to just see some of the brighter stars in the field, then a short test shot to verify after locating a guidestar and I was ready to start imaging.
Scott