Elephant Trunk Nebula (Jon Rista)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Cepheus (Cep) · Contains: IC 1396

Elephant Trunk Nebula

This is probably my best DSLR image to date. I gathered a total of 130 subs over three nights, integrated 116 of them. I usually integrate 30-60 subs, and I have always struggled with noise. I've long figured that I would need to top 100 subs to really get noise down to manageable levels, and I think this image is finally demonstrating to me what can be done with a DSLR with proper integration time and exposure depth.

Imaged with a Canon EOS 7D (UNmodded, with an Astronomik CLS filter), Canon EF 600mm f/4 L II lens, on an Orion Atlas. Guided with the Orion 50mm Mini guidescope and QHY5L-II guidecam. Guide RMS ~0.7", which is decent, not terribly great (think I need a smaller image scale in the guider to get better results.)

My longest integration to date, I'm quite pleased with the noise quality, the amount of detail resolved, and the structure exposed in dust lanes and nebular structures.

Final
Original
B

Cloudy Nights
Central USA

5 - Deep Sky Objects (DSO)
8 - DSLR

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	357713
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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