Rory Glasgow Nebulae

IC 1396 – The Elephant’s Trunk Nebula

The Elephant's Trunk Nebula
IC 1396, the Elephant’s Trunk Nebula. 1,830 x 15s at 120 gain on the Dwarf 3, processed in Siril.

This imaging project was a milestone for me. It is, by far, the largest set of exposures that I have collected on a single object: 1,830 individual images! At 15 seconds per image, that works out to more than 7 hours and 37.5 minutes of exposure time.

And it would have been longer had I not somehow lost one night’s imaging session. I’m not sure what happened, but the files were permanently deleted. I was doing cleanup on my laptop, so it’s possible I got confused and deleted files off the telescope, instead. In my defense, it was very early in the morning, and I had been up most of the night doing astronomy…

But why did I have to take so many images to get this picture? IC 1396, the Elephant’s Trunk Nebula is not particularly faint, but the contrast is somewhat low. The extra exposure time helped bring out the subtle variations in brightness.