Elephant's Trunk nebula (IC 1396)

The Elephant's Trunk nebula is a concentration of interstellar gas and dust within the much larger ionized gas region IC 1396 located in the constellation Cepheus about 2,400 light years away from Earth. The piece of the nebula shown here is the dark, dense globule IC 1396A; it is commonly called the Elephant's Trunk nebula because of its appearance at visible light wavelengths, where there is a dark patch with a bright, sinuous rim.

The Elephant's Trunk nebula is now thought to be a site of star formation, containing several very young (less than 100,000 yr) stars that were discovered in infrared images in 2003.

The combined action of the light from the massive star ionizing and compressing the rim of the cloud, and the wind from the young stars shifting gas from the center outward lead to very high compression in the Elephant's Trunk nebula. This pressure has triggered the current generation of protostars. (dixit Wikipedia)

To take this photo i used the following setup:
Scope: TS Optics ts 80/352 astroimaging
Mount: AZEQ6
Camera: Atik One 6.0

The total exposure is around 12 hours over 2 nights in september 2016. As my camera is black & white i use Hubble color palette by stacking and mapping to RGB a combination of:

14 photos of 20 min flitering around Ha ray of Hydrogen
11 photos of 20 min filtering around OIII ray of Oxygen
11 photos of 20 min filtering around SII ray of Sulfur

I used the software Prism 10 to manage the capture, the pre-treatment (Removing offset, dark and flat). The stacking and the post-treatment was done with Pixinsight and at the end Photoshop.

I used the software Prism 10 to manage the capture, the pre-treatment (Removing offset, dark and flat). The stacking and the post-treatment was done with Pixinsight and at the end Photoshop.

Technical detail of the photo here: https://www.astrobin.com/264389

If you want more information, ask me in comment !

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