SUNSET: 
0
Photographer:
Jon Greif
Location of Photo:
Alpine, CA, USA
Date/Time of photo:
September 6-7, 2023 from 9 pm to 4 am PDT
Equipment:
Takahashi FSQ-85ED with 1.01x flattener/reducer. ZWO ASI533MC Pro imaging camera. Optolong L-Pro filter. Rainbow Astro RST-135 Mount. ZWO 30mm Mini Guide Scope with ZWO ASI290 Mini guide camera. ASIAIR Plus controller. Processed in Pixinsight 1.8.9-2. 8 hours integration time.
Description:
Emission nebula IC 1396, also known as the Elephant's Trunk Nebula, mixes glowing cosmic gas and dark dust clouds in the high and far off constellation of Cepheus. Energized by a bright central star star forming region, IC 1396 sprawls across hundreds of light-years, spanning over three degrees of the sky, nearly 3,000 light-years from Earth. Stars could still be forming inside the dark shapes by gravitational collapse. But as the denser clouds are eroded away by powerful stellar winds and radiation, any forming stars will ultimately be cutoff from the reservoir of star stuff. The colors are a composition of image data from the nebula's atomic oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur into blue, green, and red hues. This image was taken from our back yard in Alpine CA, night before last.
