February 16, 2019
You were born into motion: oceans turning, continents drifting, clouds forming, planets circling, galaxies wheeling through the dark.
NGC 2359: Thor's Helmet
Birthday · February 16, 2019
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APOD published February 16, 2019. Credit: Ignacio Diaz Bobillo. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
NGC 2359 is a helmet-shaped cosmic cloud with wing-like appendages popularly called Thor's Helmet. Heroically sized even for a Norse god, Thor's Helmet is about 30 light-years across. In fact, the helmet is more like an interstellar bubble, blown as a fast wind from the bright, massive star near the bubble's center inflates a region within the surrounding molecular cloud. Known as a Wolf-Rayet star, the central star is an extremely hot giant thought to be in a brief, pre-supernova stage of evolution. NGC 2359 is located about 15,000 light-years away in the constellation Canis Major. The remarkably detailed image is a mixed cocktail of data from broadband and narrowband filters that captures natural looking stars and the glow of the nebula's filamentary structures. It highlights a blue-green color from strong emission due to oxygen atoms in the glowing gas.
Image credit: Ignacio Diaz Bobillo