Back to photostream

The towering Trunk IC1396 "Starless version"

The Elephant's Trunk nebula is a region of ionized gasses located in the constellation Cepheus at a distance of 2,400 light-years from Earth. Of interest in this area is the population of very young newborn stars, whose intense stellar winds are excavating the interior of the nebula. Dark wisps of dust hide the cocoon of forming stars, called "globules", which will be blown away when the star ignites.

 

Captured recently in Narrowband and Broadband using a QHY600 60 Megapixel Full Frame Monochrome CMOS camera mounted on a Takahashi 130 FSQ, courtesy of QHYCCD.

This setup is available immediately for people wanting to subscribe to Grand Mesa Observatory's system 1.

grandmesaobservatory.com/equipment-rentals.

In this Hubble Palette version (SHO) the H-Alpha is mapped to green channel, SII is mapped to red channel and OIII is mapped to the blue channel. The raw data was preprocessed using Pixinsight, the stars were removed using a tool called "Starnet" I was so delighted with the result of the starless image I decided to post a starless image as well as the image with the RGB stars.

Captured bin 2x2 over 5 nights between March and July 2021 for a total acquisition time of 13.1 hours.

View in High Resolution

Astrobin

Starless Version: www.astrobin.com/n0379w/

RGB Stars Version: www.astrobin.com/0vf46r/

Flickr:

Technical Details

Captured and processed by: Terry Hancock

Location: GrandMesaObservatory.com Purdy Mesa, Colorado

Dates of Capture April 18th, July 1st, 4th, 7th and 8th 2021

HA 140 min, 28 x 300 sec

OIII 145 min, 29 x 300 sec

SII 135 min, 27 x 300 sec

LUM 94 min, 47 x 120 sec

RED 96 min, 48 x 120 sec

GREEN 92 min, 46 x 120 sec

BLUE 84 min, 42 x 120 sec

Narrowband Filters by Chroma

Camera: QHY600 Monochrome CMOS Photographic version

Gain 26, Offset 76 in Read Mode Photographic 16 bit, bin 2x2

Calibrated with Dark, Dark/Flat Frames

Optics: Walter Holloway's Takahashi FSQ 130 APO Refractor @ F5

Mount: Paramount ME

Image Scale:2.39 arcsec/pix

Image Acquisition software Maxim DL6, Pre Processing and Starnet in Pixinsight Post Processed in Photoshop CC

 

4,479 views
49 faves
2 comments
Uploaded on September 22, 2021