Elephant’s Trunk Nebula – 5th Jan 2026
IC1396 is the designation for a large region of ionised gas in the constellation of Cepheus. The most interesting part of the gas cloud is where a dark tower of dust rises up, pointing into the nebula. This tower has a separate designation of IC1396A and is known as the Elephant’s Trunk – a name which is now applied to the entire gas cloud. The nebula is about 2400 light years distant and is about 60 light years across, with the Elephant’s Trunk part spanning about 20 light years. In the head of the trunk there are a pair of newly formed stars that have created a small cavity as the radiation from the stars blows the surrounding gas away.
This image has been photographed using the SHO or Hubble palette, where separate photographs are taken using an H-Alpha, SII and OIII filter, then each set of filter data is placed in a different colour channel – SII into red, H-Alpha into Green and OIII into blue. The colours are therefore entirely false, but do allow details in the nebula to stand out much more clearly than a ‘natural’ colour image, which would be almost entirely red. I also took some RGB images for the stars so that I could remove the SHO based stars and replace them with correctly coloured ones. All processing was performed using Pixinsight.
Image Details
- Date: 5th January 2026.
- Telescope: Altair Astro 72EDF + 0.8 Focal Reducer. Focal Length: 346mm, Aperture: F4.8.
- Camera: Altair Astro 183MM Cooled Mono Astro Camera. Offset 40. Gain 400. Temp -10degC.
- Filters: H-alpha – Baader 7nm 2 inch filter. OIII – Baader 8.5nm 2 inch filter. SII – Antlia 3.5nm 2 inch filter. RGB – Optolong RGB Filters.
- Mount: Skywatcher 150i.
- Guide Scope: Altair Astro 60mm.
- Guide Camera: QHY5LII.
- Exposure Details: H-Alpha: 16 x 500sec (2hr 33min), OIII: 19 x 500sec (2hr 38min), SII: 18*500s (2hr 30min).
- Total Integration Time: 7hrs 22min.