The Elephant's Trunk Nebula in IC1396
IC1396 is a large emission nebula in Cepheus. It contains areas of dark nebulosity made up of non emitting dust. One of these areas forms the Elephant's Trunk. It is an area of active star formation about 4500 light years distant.
Date: 2 cloud interupted nights in November 2007
Epuipment: William Optics FLT 110 triplet on a Tak EM200. SXV H9 camera. Guided using WO ZS66 and SXV guidehead. Astronomic 13nm Ha and OIII filters.
Capture and processing details: A total of 12x15 mins of both HA and OIII. 2 hours of Ha was captured on the first night before cloud arrived. The second night was fairly windy with intermittent cloud. Seeing was good but transparency for the later sub exposures was poor. Captured and combined with Maxim. Further processing in PS. The Ha was mapped to red and the OIII to blue. A synthetic green channel was used with the help of Noel Carboni's Astro processing tools.