IC-1396A_Elephant-Trunk-Nebula_3-Camera-Montage_2021-11-08

IC-1396A - The Elephant Trunk Nebula

This project was conceived as part of getting accustomed to the recent acquisition of a TS-115 APO and making it ready for use in the observatory.  The Elephant Trunk Nebula was an object I got to know earlier this year so it seemed to be a good candidate for testing out the new scope.  The telescopes used for the project are the Orion ED80T CF and a TS Optics Photoline 115mm APO Triplet.  The cameras used to capture the data are a Canon 70D DSLR and a ZWO ASI533MC Pro.  The final objective was to capture images that could be similarly scaled after the post processing and see which of them have more detail or artistic appeal.

This collage of images represents several nights of photography using a combination of telescopes and cameras.  As much as possible I tried to maintain consistency with these photographs in terms of the number of hours of exposures and calibration data for the target.  The data was stacked and pre-processed using Siril 0.99.10.1. I used the same steps through the pre-processing to create the 16 bit TIFF for Starnett ++.  After creating a starless image in Starnett the images were processed using a procedure I've developed for handling nebulae images in Photoshop.  I made a concerted effort to replicate the process for each of the final images so as to closely match the final result.

Hope you'll take a minute to examine each of the images and appreciate them for their merits. Projects like these bring out the citizen scientist in us all I believe.

Telescope Equipment:
Mount – Celestron CGEM DX
Telescopes – Orion ED80T CF, TS Photoline 115mm APO Triplet
Guider- Orion StarShoot Autoguider
Filters – Optolong L-Pro, Optolong L-eXtreme
Imaging Cameras:
ZWO ASI533MC Pro
Image Details:
Details provided in image captions
Software:
Astro Photography Tools (APT) – PhD2 – image capture
Siril 0.99 – Pre-Processing, Stacking, Stretching
Starnett ++ (to separate nebula from stars)
Post Processing – Adobe Photoshop CC,
Astronomy Tools Action Set for Photoshop
Capture Date:
October~November 2021
Taken at the When Pigs Fly Observatory