IC1396 - The Elephant's Trunk Nebula. Located about 2400 light years from earth, in the constellation of Cepheus, IC1396 is a bright region of gas and dust. This area is rich in star formation, with over 10K newly formed blue stars. The prominent dust feature that is rimmed with glowing emission light is called the Elephant's Trunk Nebula and is designated IC1396A.

This one is a little different for me. Usually I take photos of galaxies or bright nebulae, or even planetary nebulas. This is my first that is focused on an area of dark dust!

Also a first for me - this is the first image I am sharing from my second scope setup! O the night of the 7-17-20 I had both scopes working in parallel and I was controlling them from inside the house (Sorry mosquitoes - you'll not feed from me…). This rig uses a different kind of camera that I just learning to use. It is a cooled mono camera and in front of it I have a wheel of filters. I can make color images and pseudo color images by taking exposure with various filters and then combining those images to make a color final. I currently have a Luminance, Red, Green, Blue, Hydrogen II narrowband, Oxygen III narrowband, and Sodium II narrowband filers. So this is a little rough yst - but it is a milestone as it is my first - Still lots to learn!

This image was a first test, resulting from 20 Luminance frames, and 10 R,G,&B frames each. All Two minute exposures. So - a very short set of integrations. This allowed me to begin to start tp learn the wild and wholly world of LRGB processing…

Here are the image details:

20 x 120 seconds Lum

10 x 120 seconds R

10 x 120 seconds G

10 x 120 seconds B

100 x 2 second Bias exposures

50 x 120 second Dark exposures

100 Lum Flats

100 R Flats

100 G Flats

100 B Flats.

Scope: Astrophysics 130mm Starfire F/8.35 APO refractor

Guide Scope: Televue 76mm Doublet

Camera: ZWO ASI1600mm-pro with ZWO Filter wheel with ZWO filter set

Guide Camera: ZWO ASI290Mini

Focus Motor: Pegasus Astro Focus Cube 2

Mount: Ioptron CEM60

Polar Alignment: Ioptron Ipolar ingtrated aliggment cameras

Capture Software: PHD2 Guider, Sequence Generator Pro controller

Image Processing: Deepsky Stacker, Pixinsight, Photoshop