IC 1396 - The Elephant’s Trunk - in LRGB
Date: July 22, 2020
Cosgrove’s Cosmos Catalog ➤#0040
IC 1396 - The Elephant’s Trunk Nebula that was created in LRGB. (click to enlarge)
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About the Target
IC1396 - The Elephant's Trunk Nebula. Located about 2400 light-years from Earth, in the constellation of Cepheus, IC1396 is a bright region of gas and dust. This area is rich in star formation, with over 10K newly formed blue stars. The prominent dust feature rimmed with glowing emission light is called the Elephant's Trunk Nebula and is designated IC1396A.
The Annotated Image
For some reason, Pixinsight’s ImageSolver was not able to platesolve this image so I could not create my annotated image in the normal fashion. So I ended up doing a screen grab of the image from my Astrobin account. Thanks Astrobin - a truly great resource for Astrophotographers.
About the Project
This one is a little different for me. Usually, I take photos of galaxies or bright nebulae, or even planetary nebulas. However, this is my first that is focused on an area of dark dust!
Also, a first for me - this is the first image I am sharing from my second scope setup! On the night of the 7-17-20, I had both scopes working in parallel, and I was controlling them from inside the house (Sorry mosquitoes - you'll not feed on me…). This rig uses a different kind of camera that I am just learning to use. It is a cooled mono camera, and mounted in front of it is a wheel of filters. I can make color images and pseudocolor images by taking exposures with various filters and then combining those images to make a color final. I currently have Luminance, Red, Green, Blue broadband filters, Hydrogen-Alpha, Oxygen III, and Sulfur II narrowband filers. So this is a little rough yet - but it is a milestone as it is my first - Still lots to learn!
This image was the first test, resulting from 20 Luminance frames and 10 R, G, &B frames each. All Two-minute exposures. So - a very short set of integrations. This allowed me to begin to start to learn the wild and wholly world of LRGB processing…
The Location in the Sky
IAU/Sky & Telescope Constellation Chart for Cepheus, showing tCI 1396’s location indicated by a yellow arrow.
Capture Details
Light Frames
20 x 120 seconds Lum
10 x 120 seconds R
10 x 120 seconds G
10 x 120 seconds B
Total of 1.66 hours
7-28-21 note: I was so new at this at the time, I never recorded little details like camera binning or cooldown temps!
Cal Frames
100 x 2-second Bias exposures
50 x 120-second Dark exposures
100 Lum Flats
100 R Flats
100 G Flats
100 B Flats
Capture Hardware
Scope: Astrophysics 130mm Starfire F/8.35 APO refractor
Guide Scope: Televue 76mm Doublet
Camera: ZWO ASI1600mm-pro with ZWO Filter wheel with ZWO LRGB filter set, and ZWO GeII 7nm Narrowband filter set
Guide Camera: ZWO ASI290Mini
Focus Motor: Pegasus Astro Focus Cube 2
Mount: Ioptron CEM60
Polar Alignment: Polemaster camera
Software
Capture Software: PHD2 Guider, Sequence Generator Pro controller
Image Processing: Pixinsight, Photoshop - assisted by Coffee, extensive processing indecision and second-guessing, editor regret and much swearing…..
Over the winter, I began to get things ready for the second platform. Clearly I had some work to do. I needed to determine what I was going to do for a camera, and I needed to determine what to do get the mount functioning at the precision needed.