NGC 2359 - Thor's Helmet

NGC 2359 has been sculpted by the powerful stellar winds of WR 7, a Wolf-Rayet star that was born with more than 40 solar masses and is now in one of the final stages of its evolution. WR 7 is losing mass through stellar winds approaching 2,000 km/s, carving and compressing the surrounding gas into the nebula's distinctive shape. In a few hundred thousand years, it is expected to end its life as a supernova? Producing this image required meticulous work with Generalized Hyperbolic Stretch (GHS). This processing taught me how important it is to master this tool in order to extract every bit of signal hidden in the data and reveal the faintest structures. For the processing workflow, I used the outstanding image by Gianni Lacroce, created from the same Telescope Network dataset, as my reference.