Object: The Elephant’s Trunk Nebula is a concentration of interstellar gas and dust within the much larger ionized gas region IC 1396 located in the constellation Cepheus about 2,400 light years away from Earth.
The Elephant’s Trunk Nebula is now thought to be a site of star formation, containing several very young (less than 100,000 years) stars that were discovered in infrared images in 2003. Two older (but still young, a couple of million years, by the standards of stars, which live for billions of years) stars are present in a small, circular cavity in the head of the globule. Winds from these young stars may have emptied the cavity.
The combined action of the light from the massive star ionizing and compressing the rim of the cloud, and the wind from the young stars shifting gas from the center outward lead to very high compression in the Elephant’s Trunk Nebula. This pressure has triggered the current generation of protostars.
Look toward the center and you will see the reddish nebula which is the Elephant’s Trunk. The darker patches are dark nebula.
Taken: September 25-26, 2019
Telescope: Skywatcher Esprit 80 ED Triplet APO Refractor
Mount: Paramount ME II unguided
Camera: ZWO ASI1600MC-Pro (cooled to -15C; unity gain) Bin 1×1.
Focuser: Manual
Exposures: 41×300 sec. for a total exposure time of 3.42 hours; calibrated with 100 bias frames, 20 dark frames, 32 flat frames with 32 dark-flats
Seeing Conditions:
Processed with PixInsight and Photoshop CC 2019