IC 1396, Elephant Trunk with Mu Cepheus, the Garnet Star. (Alan Brunelle)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Cepheus (Cep) · Contains: B161 · B163 · Erakis · IC 1396 · PK100+04.1 · Sh2-131 · The star Garnet Star (μCep) · VdB142 · mu. Cep

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IC 1396, Elephant Trunk with Mu Cepheus, the Garnet Star.

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IC 1396, Elephant Trunk with Mu Cepheus, the Garnet Star.

Two panel Mosaic: 70 subs on the IC1369 panel and 59 on the Mu Ceph panel. 180 sec each sub. Taken on July 13, 14, 15.

This is a two panel mosaic covering only part of this very sizable and complex nebula. This is a revisit with new data. I did an early attempt at the Elephant Trunk just after starting my astrophoto hobby and I had hoped to do a better job this time. I also wanted to expand the field of view to capture the Mu Cepheus. I may come back to this to add other panels. Though I collected a decent number of subs over two nights, persistent winds at my site caused me to ditch a good number and impacted things otherwise. Also, I was struggling with about the worst of my tilt and backspacing issues at the time. While I seemed to get decent detail in the nebulosities, many of the stars are out of whack!

I have used GradientMergeMosaic on two other projects without much issue, but this time it gave me big problems. Basically constant error messages about mismatch panel sizes, and when I worked my way around that it did a lousy job of stitching. In fact, I needed no background extraction or gradient removal, as it ended up being unnecessary. And I noticed that Star Alignment gave me what I needed since I had no gradients and the field was flat. It did a fine job in the slight rotation needed to do the alignment.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3908843
PixInsight job	7PF8PQJVEW4V07LSMK6R2XRWETKXDWAT
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	21h38m59s.19
RA (top/left)	21h42m20s.91
RA (top/right)	21h49m19s.70
RA (bottom/right)	21h35m19s.45
RA (bottom/left)	21h29m08s.38

Dec (center)	+58°09′23″.1
Dec (top/left)	+56°37′38″.2
Dec (top/right)	+59°00′42″.0
Dec (bottom/right)	+59°40′50″.9
Dec (bottom/left)	+57°15′12″.3

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IC 1396, Elephant Trunk with Mu Cepheus, the Garnet Star.

IC 1396, Elephant Trunk with Mu Cepheus, the Garnet Star.

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IC 1396, Elephant Trunk with Mu Cepheus, the Garnet Star.

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