IC 1396a - Elephant's Trunk Nebula (2025)

This spectacular object is my latest version of the Elephant's Trunk Nebula or IC 1396a. It is a dark, dense globule of dust with a bright rim of highly ionized gas that extends over 20 light-years. It is part of a very large region of ionized gas, IC 1396, located approximately 2,400 ly away in the constellation Cepheus. Winds from two young stars in the center of the end of the trunk have carved out a cavity in the globule. Just left of these stars is vdB 142, a small blue reflection nebula surrounding bright star HD239710.

I have imaged the entire nebula, IC 1396, with smaller focal length faster setups (small f-ratio) in the past, however, I used the EdgeHD8 with a focal length of 2032mm and f/10 focal ratio. Since the focal ratio was large, i.e. slow, a longer total exposure is necessary. I have been using this setup for small galaxies and smaller bright objects but figured I would give it a shot on a larger emission nebula to pick more detail. I am very happy how it turned out and one added benefit of this target was that it was far from the moon. This was especially helpful when limited clear nights were available.

In addition to the three dimensional look, there are two small dark spots next to small yellow and blue stars on the upper left region. At first I thought they might be dust spots or dead pixels, however, I checked many other images and saw these same spots - not sure what they are. Lasty, I was very selective on the exposures and deleted many frames including all of the natural luminosity data as I was not centered correctly.

Dates: 4-27, 4-28, 4-30, 5-26

Higher Quality:
https://www.astrobin.com/isj36n/?nc=collection&nce=712

IC 1396a - Elephant's Trunk Nebula (2025)
Dates: 6-2-25, 6-4, 6-20, 6-23, 6-24
Camera: ZWO ASI294MC Pro
Telescope: Celestron EdgeHD 800
Barlow: None
Focal Length: 2032mm (native)
F/10 (native)
Focal Reducer: None
Mount: Orion Atlas Pro
Filter Adaptor: ZWO Filter Drawer
Filter: IDAS NBZ
Focuser: ZWO EAF
Autoguiding: Askar M54 OAG/ZWO ASI174 mini
Exposure: NBZ 200 x 300 (16h 40m)
Gain: 139
Offset 0
Temp: 0 C
Processing: Asiair app, PixInsight, Photoshop, BlurXT, NoiseXT, StarX, Bill's Color Masks, Bill's Stretching, GraXpert

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