Here is the much imaged elephant's trunk embded in the wonderful complex of IC1396 in Cepheus. I wanted to improve on my
image taken in December last year with relatively short exposures in Ha and Oiii. I realised the Oiii signal was fairly weak and so decided to major on the Ha and add in RGB and this is the result. I added the Ha to the red channel 50/50 and used the LRGB combination script in PI to combine with the Ha as luminance. I started out on 23rd August when we had some promising clear nights but every night was blighted by high cloud so I've neded up discarding several hours worth of images, I would have liked more RGB but not to be this time.
If you look at the lower right hand of the image you can see two dark spots (more clearly visible in the Ha image) I thought these were cold pixels but checked other images and they are present there too so are likely to be Bok globules in this very active region.
Clear skies, Rob
Comments