IC1396A Elephant's Trunk Nebula (Joe Niemeyer)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Cepheus (Cep)

IC1396A Elephant's Trunk Nebula, Joe Niemeyer

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IC1396A Elephant's Trunk Nebula

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IC1396A Elephant's Trunk Nebula

This is my image of the Elephant's Trunk Nebula (IC 1396A) located in the constellation Cepheus about 2,400 light years away from Earth. This towering globule of dust and gas is the central feature of a much larger emission nebula of ionized hydrogen that is more than 100 light years wide. The bright rim around the dust tower is gas being ionized and illuminated by a nearby massive star. Infrared images of this nebula reveal that it is an area of active star formation with lots of baby stars (less than 100,000 years old) embedded in the dust. A couple of toddler stars (a few million years old) are peeking through the circular cavity at the top of the tower. I think you really have to use your imagination to see why they call this the Elephant's Trunk. The circle at the top is supposedly the elephant's head and the dust lane extending downward is its trunk. It's a pretty big elephant because its trunk is 20 light years long!

I made this image from thirty 300-second exposures shot at 1630mm focal length through my Baader dual-bandpass filter (Hα and OIII), calibrated with 20 each dark, flat, and dark flat frames. I stacked the frames with Astro Pixel Processor and post-processed with StarNet++, Photoshop, and DeNoise AI.

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The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

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Status	Basic success
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Astrometry.net job	4992917
PixInsight job	n/a
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IC1396A Elephant's Trunk Nebula

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