I've finally had some decent weather. Few clouds and no wind. I had a chance to take an image of an object I've never taken before:
From Wikipedia:
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.
[1] The piece of the
nebula
shown here is the dark, dense globule IC 1396A; it is commonly called
the Elephant's Trunk nebula because of its appearance at visible light
wavelengths, where there is a dark patch with a bright, sinuous rim. The
bright rim is the surface of the dense cloud that is being illuminated
and ionized by a very bright, massive star that is just to the west of
IC 1396A. (In the Figure above, the massive star is just to the left of
the edge of the image.) The entire IC 1396 region is ionized by the
massive star, except for dense globules that can protect themselves from
the star's harsh ultraviolet rays.
The Elephant's Trunk nebula is now thought to be a site of star
formation, containing several very young (less than 100,000 yr) 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.
[2]
SW254N
EQ-g
guided
Canon 350d (modified)
ISO800
15 each 2 min images
Darks, Flats, Bias applied
