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 LY away from Earth. 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 bright rim is the surface of the dense cloud that is being illuminated and ionized by a very bright, massive star HD206267. The 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 (from Wikipedia).

This nebula is among my preferred ones. As a matter of fact, it is fantastically rich of details with strong gradients of HII, SII and OIII emissions, thus enabling to generate an extremely large panel of personal interpretations of this wonderful dark sky object.

My objective was to immortalize the nebula by revealing as many details as possible for every emission wavelength (Ha, SII, OIII), so to reveal its very complex nature. I also tried to maintain as much homogeneity I could with the histograms, so to avoid dominant colors and an unbalanced end result. This part of the processing revealed to be very tricky because the nebula has very strong and inhomogenous gradients. Thus, what triggers the color complexity of the nebula has the consequence that it seems impossible to generate a perfect gaussian on the histograms (something that I could more or less generate in my two previous images published on Astrobin).

To reveal the details appropriately I used a gentle sharpening with BXT (value of 050) on the Ha layer. I also slightly denoised it to smoothen the end result. By comparing the details with the original Ha layer, which I used as luminance, I could barely detect any differences apart from having achieve a cleaner result.

As usual do not hesitate to comment my work

CS!

Nicola