Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cepheus (Cep)  ·  Contains:  B161  ·  B365  ·  IC 1396  ·  Sh2-131  ·  VdB142
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Elephant Trunk Nebula - IC1396 in SHO, Tom Dinneen
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Elephant Trunk Nebula - IC1396 in SHO

Acquisition type: Electronically-Assisted Astronomy (EAA, e.g. based on a live video feed)
Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Elephant Trunk Nebula - IC1396 in SHO, Tom Dinneen
Powered byPixInsight

Elephant Trunk Nebula - IC1396 in SHO

Acquisition type: Electronically-Assisted Astronomy (EAA, e.g. based on a live video feed)

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Description

Another go at an emission nebula. This one is the Elephant Trunk Nebula. It's around 2,400 light years away in the constellation Cepheus.

Acquisition went well. Once the ASIair is up and running things went pretty seamless. First meridian flip which was a bit daunting. ASIair didn't manage to centre the target so I lost a few frames before I figured it out. Seeing wasn't great but with 4ish hours of data I managed to squeeze this out.

Still struggling with a workflow but figuring things out along the way. Need more data. Also I'm seeing some halo's on my OIII. Not sure I was 100% focused (as in I didn't refocus after Ha). The colours of the stars are all wrong. I'll get more Ha, OIII and SII but I think I'd like to get some RGB as well to get the star colours right.

Used Astro Pixel Processor to calibrate, register and integrate. Then processed in Pixinsight. Had to apply some noise reduction to make up for my lack of data. Used EZ Denoise with TGVDenoise turned on. Happy with the out of the box results this gives. Branched off a luminance from Ha to which I applied a light MLT sharpen. Did my own stretching via HistogramTransformation. Found STF and MaskedStretch either over or under stretched the OIII and SII (again didn't have enough data I'm assuming). Used SHO-API to combine and mixed the channels a bit. 70/30 for R (with 10% Ha), 80/20 for G (with 20% OIII) and 90/10 for B (with 10% Ha). This also produces less magenta halos (although I still have a few of those but haven't figured out how to sort them out yet). I've also got a couple of big halos from my OIII filter. Not sure if that's focusing or the filter yet? Time will tell. Added a little bit of saturation before apply SCNR. Reduced the stars with MorphologicalTransformation. Some more CurvesTransformation to add some contrast and a bit more saturation. HDRMultiscaleTransformation to bring out some detail in the nebulosity. Then LocalHistogramEqualization to add some contrast. Then off to photoshop for a little bit of saturation tuning.

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Elephant Trunk Nebula - IC1396 in SHO, Tom Dinneen

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