This image of
IC 1396A, popularly known as the
Elephant's Trunk Nebula, is the result of 24 hours of integration in LRGB and Ha (3-nm bandpass) filters, with about 10 hours in luminance, and the rest divided roughly equally among the other four channels. An additional 9+ hours of exposures were rejected based on seeing and sky-background cuts. The data was acquired over the course of seven nights in August and October of 2021, but I left it sitting in an SSD-drive until this week, when I finally got around to processing it!
I tried to preserve as much contrast as possible throughout the image, including into the darkest regions of the nebula, which I think has helped to accentuate the very appealing multilayered texture of this beautiful field of view. As a
Canadian, I have a particular fondness for the small blue reflection nebula that lies just below the dark cavity (
cometary globule) at the top of the trunk: it is the 142nd entry in Dutch-Canadian astronomer
Sidney van den Bergh's catalogue of 158 blue reflection nebulae,
published in 1966 (he actually notes in his paper that #142 is "Located in the 'elephant trunk' structure"). And speaking of "vdB",
@Gary Imm has a fantastic
compilation of objects from that catalogue!
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