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IC 1396A, Thomas
IC 1396A, Thomas

Description

Four nights and 11 hours of exposure....

Hello Deep Sky friends,

after many weeks and months, finally a small window of opportunity arose for my project to image an object over several nights. The target was IC 1396, an inconspicuous open star cluster in the telescope, which only attracts some attention in binoculars with a nebula filter. Not under a locally illuminated night sky, of course.

The open cluster lies in the constellation Cepheus and has an apparent brightness of 3.5 mag. It lies within a large HII emission nebula that is about 2,400 Lj from Earth. The area marks a birthplace

of young stars and protostars in a collection of interstellar gas and dust. Most conspicuous is of course the well-known "Elephant Trunk Nebula" IC 1396A with only 9.4 mag. this requires quite some exposure time.

The time window for such exposures is already very limited at the end of May - astronomical darkness is no longer achievable and nautical darkness is currently between 23:30 - 03:30.

In total, these are 490 exposures in four nights with a total of 11 hours exposure time. During the nights, the seeing varied between 3 and 5 - so the stars are somewhat bloated.

In terms of EBV, we see only minimal post-processing here -

The technical equipment consisted of: ASA 12″- f:3.6 - QHY268C - EQ8 - MGEN III - image processing with PI & LR.

The pictures were taken in the nights 29.05.21 to 01.06.21.

In the end, I am satisfied with the result - and the idea of giving the individual objects more exposure time (if possible) is taking shape.

I wish you all an exciting time and of course CS

Yours Thomas

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IC 1396A, Thomas