IC 1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula #4 (Molly Wakeling)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Cepheus (Cep) · Contains: B153 · B154 · B157 · B160 · B161 · B162 · B163 · B165 · B170 · B365 · B366 · B367 · B368 · Erakis · IC 1396 · PK097+03.1 · PK098+02.1 · PK098+04.1 · PK100+04.1 · Sh2-128 · Sh2-131 · The star Garnet Star (μCep) · VdB142 · mu. Cep

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IC 1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula #4

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IC 1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula #4

A project from the camping weekend - the Elephant Trunk Nebula!

I drove up to Washington state to go camping with my family up near the Canadian border, and of course I had to bring some gear along with me. I had considered bringing my refractor and Paramount MyT with me on the trip, but since there would be only three hours of astronomical darkness as far north as we were (48 N latitude), I decided it probably wasn't worth the effort. Instead, I brought my Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer and my ZWO ASI294MC Pro attached to my Nikon 55-200mm lens that I've been running on my Celestron AVX mount recently. I tried a new thing with it this weekend -- autoguiding! The Star Adventurer actually has an ST-4 port on it (only in the RA axis -- dec is not motorized on this mount). The setup actually worked pretty decently, although it depends on how well polar-aligned you can get! I was able to get pretty decent 3-minute exposures at 200mm of focal length, which is better than I can do without guiding on that mount.

The actual Elephant Trunk structure is difficult to see here, but if you look carefully, you can see the head of it up and to the right of the bright-ish star in the center of the image (not the yellow one on the left, which is the Garnet Star). The Elephant Trunk is part of a larger nebula structure known as IC 1396. You can see the red-glowing hydrogen emission nebula, as well as dark molecular clouds throughout. The whole thing is about 2,400 lightyears away.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3687597
PixInsight job	HGG8ODWEZ5RR83UH0IWU4EUM09HXOQNK
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	21h35m05s.33
RA (top/left)	21h34m12s.38
RA (top/right)	21h11m48s.20
RA (bottom/right)	21h35m49s.79
RA (bottom/left)	22h00m12s.76

Dec (center)	+57°54′53″.9
Dec (top/left)	+61°24′36″.8
Dec (top/right)	+56°23′47″.8
Dec (bottom/right)	+54°24′33″.6
Dec (bottom/left)	+59°09′08″.5

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IC 1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula #4

IC 1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula #4

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IC 1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula #4

IC 1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula #4

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