IC 1396, ADBjester

IC 1396

IC 1396, ADBjester

IC 1396

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Description

The Elephant's Trunk is a star-forming region 3000 light years away in IC 1396 in Cephus. The Trunk is the vertical structure near the bottom center, while IC 1396 is the entire ring complex. Look for tiny outlying red star forming globules in the fringes. This is an image in standard HaLRGB taken between May and December 2012, and processed tonight by me in PhotoShop. L=17x300 Ha=17x600 RGB=5 x 300 @ bin2. H-Alpha was used to augment both the Luminance and the Red channel. You've probably seen the Elephant's Trunk more commonly imaged in narrowband, such as this NASA APOD:

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130726.html

The bright star in the upper right is Herschel's Garnet Star, a red supergiant that is one of the largest known stars by radius. It has twice the radius of Betelgeuse, and approaches VY Canis Majoris as the largest sized star overall. If it were at the center of our solar system, the surface of the star would extend beyond Jupiter's orbit and about half way to Saturn's. It's *BIG*. It will go supernova and collapse to a black hole soon (in astronomical terms) -- in the next few million years.

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IC 1396, ADBjester