Elephant's Trunk Nebula

Elephant's Trunk Nebula is a nebula, a structure of gas and dust, located in the constellation Cepheus. It belongs to a lot larger emission nebula IC 1396 (the entire red object in the image). The elephant's trunk itself is only a small part (in the middle of the crop in the second image), which really looks like a curled elephant's trunk. The whole nebula is ionized by a massive star in the center and is home to very young stars. It lies at a distance of 2400 light years and has a size of 6 full moons in the night sky!

 

The obviously red star at the edge of the nebula is called Herschel's Garnet Star or Erakis. It was noted by William Heschel, who described it as "a very fine deep garnet colour, such as the periodical star Omicron Ceti (variable star in Cetus)". It is one of the largest known stars with a radius of around 1.2 billion km and is expected to explode "soon" like a supernova and become a black hole.

 

There is also a part of Sh2-129 (the Squid Nebula) in the lower right corner.

 

I took this image in August with my modified Canon EOS 1300D and CLS filter. It was made from only less than two hours because of a short night and clouds, but it still looks pretty good.

 

Canon EOS 1300D (modified), SVBony CLS filter

Sigma 135mm f/2.8

iOptron SkyGuider Pro

 

EXIF: 104x60sec (1 hour 44 minutes in total), ISO 6400, f/5.6

Darks, flats, dark flats, biases

 

Processed in DSS, Siril, StarNet++ and Photoshop

14/08/2023, Mašov, Czech Republic (Bortle 5)

Done