IC 1396 is a faint emission nebula in Cepheus. It is excited by the 5.6 magnitude star at its centre. It is 3000 light years away and spans over 2° in the sky making it over 100 light years across. The nebula contains a number of dark rifts, one of which is called the Elephant's Trunk Nebula. I am not at all sure which it is in my image as, to me, none of them looks like an elephant's head and trunk. I think it may be the small one to the right of the central star.
This is the result of a single exposure of 4 minutes taken through an H-alpha filter with my MX716 camera. A considerable enhancement was needed to bring out the nebula. The picture was coloured by using the fully-enhanced picture for the red channel; a version of the same picture with the gamma reduced to 0.8 was used for the green and blue channels. This process kept most of the stars white.
Date and Time: 29th September 2011 20:05 to 20:20 UT
Camera: Starlight Xpress MX716
Telescope: 135 mm SLR lens with Astromomik Hα filter
Capture: Starlight star_mx7, 4-minute exposure
Processing: Starlight star_mx7. auto-background, non-linear stretch factor 25, auto-background.
Irfanview. Conversion to png.
PhotoImpact. R: gamma 1.4, contrast and brightness +10
G,B: gamma 0.8
Photoshop: Contrast +30 to red channel, RGB combination.
PhotoImpact: Focus Magic 1, Gamma 1.5
Gaussian Blur 1
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