Elephant Trunk Nebula - Uncropped (Jeff McClure)

Elephant Trunk Nebula - Uncropped

This again is the Elephant's Trunk Nebula (IC 1369) accented by the bright Garnet Star (Mu Cephei). Getting a good color finished product when shooting relatively faint nebulae imbedded in the star-rich Milky Way is quite a challenge, but this one is, I think worth looking at. Many on-line images use star-erasing software that stretches the surrounding nebula coloration to cover where the star really was. I have made a point her of not eliminating stars, but rather carefully reducing the glare in order to reveal the huge, excited hydrogen cloud from which many of them were born. IC 1369 is about 2,400 light years from earth

The glaringly bright and larger stars are much, much closer than the nebula or the mass of galactic stars that fill the picture, but are actually not any brighter than the small white dots. The exception is the Garnet Star, about 6,000 light years from us, which is a red super-giant star averaging about 2,536 times the size and 36,000 times the brightness of our sun. I use the work "averaging" because it fluctuates in size and brightness by a factor of 4 over a period of 2. to 2.5 years. If Mu Cephei were in the place of our sun it would extend out to somewhere between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. Mu Cephei is a very unstable star with a darker companion star of similar size. It will (or perhaps already has) explode into a super-nova at some point in the (by galactic terms) not too distant future. When it does we should be thankful is is far, far away because that is going to be one heck of a big bang!

Both the red and the black areas in this image are not the depths of space, but relatively dense molecular hydrogen clouds that block us from seeing (or being fried by) the mass of stars that constitute the core of our galaxy.

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