Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cepheus (Cep)  ·  Contains:  LBN 451  ·  LBN 452  ·  LDN 1098  ·  LDN 1099  ·  LDN 1105  ·  VdB142

Image of the day 08/09/2016

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    21 Hours on the Elephant Trunk (Hubble Palette), John Hayes
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    21 Hours on the Elephant Trunk (Hubble Palette)

    Image of the day 08/09/2016

    Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
      21 Hours on the Elephant Trunk (Hubble Palette), John Hayes
      Powered byPixInsight

      21 Hours on the Elephant Trunk (Hubble Palette)

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      Description

      The Elephant’s Trunk is located within the larger structure of IC-1396 at a distance of 2,400 lys in the constellation of Cepheus. The upper portion of the elephant’s trunk is backlit by a nearby, very luminous, massive star. This whole region is thought to be a star nursery since it contains a number of stars that are less than 100,000 years old. These baby stars were discovered in the infrared in 2003. Stellar winds from two of the young stars in the curled “trunk” have pushed dust and gas outward to compress the material in the nebula, which is triggering the formation of a new generation of young stars.

      The narrowband data for this image was gathered with my C14 Edge automated roll-out observatory over a period of five consecutive clear nights with pretty average seeing. Other than convincing my family that this project wouldn't go on forever, perhaps the biggest challenge was the wind. Almost every evening started out with gusty winds 7-9 mph. I had to toss some data due to vibration induced by the wind on a coupe of nights but fortunately the wind usually died out by around midnight. Except for one night that produced zero data (due to a bug in some new software,) my automated system worked well to take advantage of this delightful string of super clear, beautiful summer nights. This is my longest exposure to date. I ran up the exposure time up simply because I wanted to optimize my chances of pulling a bit more detail out of the faint dark areas. If you look closely along the right side of the image, you can find at least three very small dark “tadpoles” of dust floating in space. There appear to be other dark tadpoles in the main part of the trunk as well.

      This image is dedicated to my wife and kids who patiently put up with my absence each night while I gathered subs. As always, C&C is very welcome.

      John

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        21 Hours on the Elephant Trunk (Hubble Palette), John Hayes
        Original
        21 Hours on the Elephant Trunk (Hubble Palette), John Hayes
        B
        21 Hours on the Elephant Trunk (Hubble Palette), John Hayes
        C
      • Final
        21 Hours on the Elephant Trunk (Hubble Palette), John Hayes
        E

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      21 Hours on the Elephant Trunk (Hubble Palette), John Hayes

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