July 4th, 2016 - The Elephant's Trunk Nebula (IC 1396) is a concentration of interstellar gas and dust within the much larger ionized gas region located in the constellation Cepheus about 2,400 light years away from Earth.

I got the chance to drive to Delaware Park which is located in Palms – Michigan, in dark sky map this park is considered to be in Blue to dark zone and the stars there are simply mesmerizing, the only down side is towards the South you get USA-Canadian border light pollution and towards the West is tree line, other than that it’s beautiful.

Decided to capture the Elephant’s trunk nebula which was almost straight up, and I managed to capture 30 Subs 120sec each for all (Ha, OIII and SII) filters, everything went smooth with no clouds and perfect clear sky.

Now usually at this point I drive back home super tired, the sun is burning my sore eyes, once I reach home I carry everything inside and go straight to bed and if I have to go to work then I’ll take a one hour nap and then hit the road to work, I know story of my life and some will say that’s crazy.

But the rewarding part starts when you stack the images together and work slowly with image processing to produce the final image.

This process usually starts as follows

1) Calibrate each sub with the correspondence master Bias, Dark and Flat frames

2) Align and Stack the calibrated subs

The final results will look like that for each filter

The next steps to create the final image would be as follows (Credit goes to Jason Guenzel https://www.astrobin.com/users/Thirteen/ for assisting me with the image processing)

3) Match the background of each frame to the other by running LinearFit process in PixInsight, or by simply playing with curves in Photoshop and try your best.

4) Assign each of the Narrowband filter frame to a color channel and combine it, to create the Hubble Palette effect you assign (Ha=Green, OIII=Blue and SII=Red) and you combine to create the RGB image

5) At this point you start playing with curves and level, color saturation and mapping to create the final image that satisfy your artistic need, the below website will give you a very nice tutorial whether you are using PixInsight or Photoshop.

http://bf-astro.com/hubblep.htm

http://www.lightvortexastronomy.com/tutorials.html

Now at this point you will probably end up with an image that looks like what you see below, which is frankly speak it looks amazing and for most of us will call it out and start showing off which is the truth … LOL. But for some with OCD like I am you know you can do better so here is the trick.

After you are done with the stacking process you can try to remove all the stars from the image (there are a lot of tutorials on the Internet that will describe in details how to do so) and then go ahead and combine the images together to create the RGB frame and after you are done with the curves and levels and color saturation, you can simply bring back the stars by adding only the Ha frame to the image and it’s as simple as adding another lighting layer in Photoshop and play with the opacity until you are satisfied.

The final image will simply bring up the WOW effect, I really hope that you like the information above and will be useful.