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A celestial battle of the ages - NGC2359 Thor's Helmet Nebula vs IC2177 Seagull Nebula


Elp

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Nearly managed to close off a busy year with this one having imaged during two fortuitous December nights back to back (freezing myself in the process) but running into the new year to finish. NGC2359 Thor's Helmet Nebula and IC2177 Seagull Nebula framed together for one final battle.

I've wanted to do this composition for a while, and re-jigged my dual Samyang rig in order to do it, but due to FOV mismatch only the one lens tends to work so I may split them up in future so they both get centre FOV. Had to do some work to rebuild two corners due to the stacking mismatch but happy with how it turned out. I was going to image RGB stars and input but haven't got around to it yet so may do so in the near future whilst I can still image it in my 30/60min window per night!

1423512867_NGC2359ThorsHelmetIC2177SeagullNebula-Dec22Jan23-doimg-Copy.thumb.jpg.7433a48d7c7825c3933bdb600f33fb61.jpg

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Wow, that’s gorgeous. I find something rather hypnotic about staring at beautiful image like that. One can easily get ‘lost’ in the image and their own thoughts and contemplations. 
 

but as the wife says, maybe that’s just me 😂

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Thanks all. What strikes me is their relative sizes.

According to Sky Safari Thor's Helmet is 8 x 6 arc min across and 1800 ly distant in the same galactic arm as us (Orion spur). The Seagull Nebula is 120 x 40 arc min across and 5900 ly distant in the same Orion spur as ourselves so same general direction as Thor but further away. So the Seagull is so much larger in comparison. Something like the California Nebula is 145 x 40 arc min across at a distance of 1800 ly. It's amazing how close most of these nebulae are, and also due to not being able to "see" through our galaxy arms how abundant such things are near to us and around us.

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Yes, a free plugin I use and then I tried to bring it back with a high pass which helped on the larger target but not so much on the smaller one. The resolution the SY135 isn't brilliant on small targets and the clear giveaway is the detail is lost on Thor. I've been imaging it at 370mm and will do 1000mm and you can see a clear step up in resolutions on those, probably will take 2 to 3 months to complete though at this rate.

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Just looking at this a bit more, even though its a very short integration time I did manage to capture VDB095, a bow shockwave which I can't really find much info on but to quote Galactic Hunter: "It is believed to come from the interaction between the interstellar dust within the nebula, high radiation winds, and gas expelling from the double star system "FN CMa”." It would make for a good lucky imaging target I think.

1935603535_IC2177SeagullNGC2359ThorNebula-Vdb95BowShockwave-Copy.jpg.2711a39df2d52353fabe48435b27785f.jpg

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  • 3 weeks later...

That’s a lovely image - it was your image that made me realise Thors Helmet was that close to the seagull… I thought I was finished but now Im thinking I’ll have to do a mosaic :) . I have a slightly longer window each night (about 2-3 hours) but now the moons coming round and it’s cloudy again anyway…fingers crossed…

 

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