It was once part of the much larger constellation known as the Argo Navis together with the constellations Carina and Vela. Puppis is one of the larger constellations, occupying an area of 673 square degrees in the southern sky. The helmet is a cosmic bubble, blown as the wind from the bright, massive star near the bubble’s centre sweeps through the surrounding molecular cloud. The helmet-shaped nebula is around 15 000 light-years away from Earth and is over 30 light-years across. This object, also known as NGC 2359, lies in the constellation of Canis Major (The Great Dog). Notable deep sky objects in Canis Major include the open clusters Messier 41, Caroline’s Cluster (NGC 2360) and the Tau Canis Majoris Cluster (NGC 2362), the emission nebula NGC 2359, also known as Thor’s Helmet, the interacting spiral galaxies NGC 2207 and IC 2163, and the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, the closest neighbouring satellite galaxy to Earth. It is part of two major asterisms, the Winter Hexagon and the Winter Triangle, which dominate the evening sky in the winter months.Ĭanis Major contains four other stars brighter than magnitude 3.00 – Adhara (Epsilon CMa), Wezen (Delta CMa), Mirzam (Beta CMa) and Aludra (Eta CMa) – but these are a lot more distant than Sirius and considerably more luminous. The system is only 8.60 light years distant from Earth. It is a binary star system consisting of an A-type main sequence star and a faint white dwarf. Sirius has an apparent magnitude of -1.46, which makes it almost twice as bright as the second brightest star, Canopus. The three stars of Orion’s Belt point directly at Sirius. Home to Sirius, the brightest star in the sky and one of the nearest stars to the solar system, the constellation is easy to find in the winter sky as it sits next to Orion. NGC 2244 and the Rosette Nebula, image: Andreas Fink (CC BY-SA 3.0)Ĭanis Major is slightly smaller but considerably brighter than Monoceros. The constellation is also home to A0620-00, a binary system that contains the nearest known black hole to the Sun, located at an approximate distance of 3,300 light years.
Monoceros, the Unicorn, is relatively faint, with no stars brighter than magnitude 3.00, but it contains several well-known variable stars – V838 Monocerotis, S Monocerotis and R Monocerotis – as well as Plaskett’s Star (V640 Monocerotis), one of the most massive binary stars known. Image: NASA, ESA, Andrew Fruchter (STScI), and the ERO team (STScI + ST-ECF) Although this bright central region resembles a ball of twine, it is, in reality, a bubble of material being blown into space by the central star’s intense “wind” of high-speed material. The Eskimo’s “face” also contains some fascinating details.
In this Hubble telescope image, the “parka” is really a disk of material embellished with a ring of comet-shaped objects, with their tails winding away from the central star. This stellar relic, first spied by William Herschel in 1787, is nicknamed the “Eskimo” Nebula (NGC 2392) because, when viewed through ground-based telescopes, it resembles a face surrounded by a fur parka. In its first glimpse of the heavens following the successful December 1999 servicing mission, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured a majestic view of a planetary nebula, the glowing remains of a Sun-like star.
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