The Elephant's Trunk Nebula in IC1396

[AMcD]

This is work in progress on the Elephant's Trunk Nebula in IC1396, comprising 5 hours of 300 sec subframes taken last night using a QHY8 OSC with an Optolong L-Extreme filter on a TS152 achromatic refractor mounted on a Losmandy G11.  Integrations acquired using SGPro guided with PHD2 under Bortle 5 skies.  Stacked with flat frames in DSS (the QHY8 does not tend to require darks).  Processing in PS.  The 32 bit DSS tiff file was cropped, rotated, a medium/medium Gradient Exterminator applied, adjusted in levels and converted to a 16 bit tiff file in 'Gamma and Exposure'.   Five cycles of Levels / 'Curves' stretches were then applied to the 16 bit tiff file.  Noel Carboni's Astronomy Actions for PS was then used ('Enhance DSO and Reduce Stars' / 'Local Contrast Enhancement' / 'Reduce Stars /).   Final tweaks in PS with 'Colour Balance'. 'Hue and Saturation' and 'Brightness and Contrast'. 

I intend to add further data to the image when we next have a clear night to increase the SNR.

Tiff and PNG versions below:

IC1396_LF_Stack_21.10.21_5hrs.tif

Edited October 23, 2021 by AMcD
Added Annotated Astrometry

[peter shah]

super capture with some lovely detail