IC1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula (David McClain)

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

IC1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula, David McClain

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IC1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula

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IC1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula

I finally got what I believe is a decent color calibration on this image. And proof that less is more, in this case.

The saturated red color comes from H-alpha mixed with H-beta to be slightly pink / magenta (barely), while the orange is indicative of dust scattering of starlight from behind.

The ATIK camera tends toward strongly red, with deep saturated levels. To achieve this better balance and restore the dust scattering components, I had to calibrate against M31 as the nominal white balance, and use the region just above the middle of the image as the neutral gray region.

The "less is more" comes from using only the first few frames from the night, and foregoing the mix with another batch of frames lasting more than twice as long as these frames. The longer duration frames had real problems in their flat fielding, whereas these were really quite good. So leaving out the remainder of the hour of exposures led to a much better image overall.

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	995197
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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IC1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula

IC1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula

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IC1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula

IC1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula

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