The Elephant's Trunk nebula is a concentration of interstellar gas and dust within the much larger ionized gas region IC 1396 located in the constellation Cepheus about 2,400 light years away from Earth.
This cosmic elephant's trunk is over 20 light-years long. The false-color view was recorded through narrow band filters that transmit the light from hydrogen (in green), sulfur (in red), and oxygen (in blue) atoms in the region. The resulting composite highlights the bright swept-back ridges that outline pockets of cool interstellar dust and gas. Such embedded, dark, tendril-shaped clouds contain the raw material for star formation and hide protostars within the obscuring cosmic dust.
[description text adapted from wikipedia and NASA APOD].
All sub exposures were acquired from my backyard on Sept, 24-27 2013.
- 17 x 30m Ha (5nm)
- 20 x 30m OIII (3nm)
- 26 x 30m SII (3nm)
Total exposure time: 31.5 hours
Equipment:
Main Camera: QSI 583 WSG
Guide Camera: SXV Lodestar (on OAG)
Mount: Astro-Physics Mach 1
Scope: Explore Scientific 102 f/7 (FL: 696mm)
Image Aquisition software MaximDL
Registed, Calibrated and Stacked in MaximDL
Post Processed with PixInsight 1.8 and Photoshop CS6
Astrometry annotations:
Center (RA, Dec)
323.892, 57.475)
Center (RA, hms):21h 35m 34.133s
Center (Dec, dms):+57° 28' 28.609"
Size:1.47 x 1.11 deg
Radius:0.923 deg
Pixel scale:1.6 arcsec/pixel
Up is -4.32 degrees E of N
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