IC1396 - Elephants Trunk Nebula in HST palette

[Paramount]

Hi
I managed to get 5 hours of SII data in 30 minute sub frames last night. Sky conditions weren't brilliant and even with the moon not rising till early morning the sky never got very dark (a problem this time of year) which makes narrow band imaging the only choice for me. This was taken with the following
Takahashi FSQ106ED at f5
Starlight Xpress SXVF H9
Paramount ME
Lodestar and OAG for guiding
5nm narrow band filters
Exposures are 8x30 minutes for Ha and 10x30 minutes for OIII and SII
Colour combined with a 7:1:5 ratio for SII:Ha:OIII. No sharpening, smoothing or noise reduction has been used. Multiple iterations of levels followed by multiple iterations of contrast curves were used with some colour adjustments and de-saturation of the magenta stars
I have put the three stages from the last couple of weeks on the home page of my website
http://www.imagingtheheavens.co.uk
and a full size high resolution image can be seen at the following link
http://www.pbase.com/imaging_the_hea...80409/original
Thanks for looking
Best wishes and clear skies
Gordon

[Lester]

Brilliant image Gordon, the colour variation from top to bottom really gives it some punch. Thanks for the view.

[telemarker (Keith)]

Great contrast. Good colours. Top image. It seems a huge column of gas. What piques my interest is the little hole at the top of the column. Has that been imaged?

Regards
Keith