Monday 18 September 2023

IC1396 The Elephant Trunk nebula

This 7 section mosaic of IC1396, commonly named the Elephant Trunk nebula lies in the star constellation of Cepheus the King. I collected the data on six separate evenings under clear sky conditions with only light pollution to contend with. The telescope was a 4 inch F/6.3 refractor, a Vixen Atlux mount, an Atik 383L mono CCD camera and a set of Astronomik narrowband filters. I captured 60 second sub frames with matching dark frames and combined them with flat field frames to reduce the effect of noise and vignetting in the final image. The total exposure times for each section with the camera set on  X2 bin mode were 60 minutes using a  H Alpha filter, 20 minutes using an O111 filter, 20 minutes using an S11 filter, 15 minutes using a H Beta filter and 15 minutes using a blue filter.