This was another side-quest project while waiting for a much bigger project’s target to rise. The Elephant’s Trunk Nebula is a star-forming area and emission nebula that’s part of a much larger area named IC1396. It hangs out about 2400 light years away in the same chunk of sky as the constellation Cepheus.

I imaged this over 11 nights between October and December, 2024 from my back yard. This includes 156 images, each 10 minutes long – totaling 26 hours of data.

Full-sized image here.

My Lightbucket imaging log is here.

Details:
Explore Scientific ED127 refractor
Hotech SCA flattener
STF-8300C camera w/ an L-eXtreme filter
G11 mount on a custom BoldMFG pier
156x 600sec sub-exposures (26.0 hours) from my Bortle ~5 backyard
Captured in NINA
Processed with Siril, GraXpert, Photoshop, NXT & Cosmic Clarity

My son asked to see what another color palette would look like, so he and I worked through an HOO version of this photo. He picked the individual color channel stretches, so here you go. (Full-sized image here.)