IC1396 - Elephants Trunk Nebula close up

[GordonH]

Hi All

I managed to get out for some imaging last night to complete the first stage of my tri-colour narrowband image of this object. The sky was clear but it never got dark courtesy of a full moon in the south and the seeing conditions remain poor where I live with the FWHM number fluctuating between 2.5 and 5 while focusing. I was still able to get 4 hours of Ha data in 24x10 minute subframes though so at least that was something. It was taken with the Takahashi BRC-250 and Starlight Xpress H9 on a Paramount ME with a Starlight Xpress M8C in 2x2 binned mode doing the guiding through my TMB 115 using dithering in Maxim DL (this was quite useful as I didn't use any darks or flats and when combining the subframes virtually all of the hot pixels disappeared)

The image looks a bit soft but that is down to the seeing conditions and also the image scale not being ideal for the conditions. I took an unguided image of this object last year with the H36, TMB and Ha filter and you can compare this latest image with that the Nebulae page of the image gallery on my website http://www.imagingtheheavens.co.uk

Thanks for looking

Best wishes

Gordon

PS On the subject of imaging and light pollution I have started my own Yahoo group light_polluted_astrophotography : Light Polluted Astrophotography so if you have similar problems to me then pop by and join in

[ncjunk]

Nice image i like it, the detail is great!

Neil C