Cepheus – Semper Iuvenis Photography

Sharpless 2-132, the Lion Nebula, is a very faint emission type nebula on the Cepheus/Lacerta border.

It is estimated to be about 10,000 to 12,000 light years away, but this is no more than an estimate.

This image consists of 16 hours of exposure from a ZWO ASI071MC OSC camera at -6c. Z73 440mm telescope riding a Skywatcher EQ6r Pro mount. Processed in PixInsight, sharpened and converted to jpg in Photoshop.

Night after night I would shoot this for a few hours with only a faint hint of a bright spot on the screen. Once I had 20 hours of data I began the processing journey. All calibrated, cosmetic correction, debayered, subframe selector weeded out about 4 hours of data that just wasn’t up to par. Weightings assigned, top 20 images identified, all frames registered to the best weighted frame, master reference image created from best 20, all frames reregistered to master reference frame, L_Norm reference frame generated, L_norm ran against all frames, finally image integration was run using calibrated, corrected, debayered, registered, lights & L_norm.

I was very pleasantly surprised when I got my first glimpse of this image. Just a little post processing required.

As winter continues more targets will be available to shoot. Sign up below to be notified of additions. Cheers!

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. 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 (HD 206267) that is just to the east of IC 1396A.

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.

Very happy to have captured this piece of our night sky from Burke County, NC. A very peaceful night here in the hills of the blue Ridge. Any questions or comments, we’d love to hear from you.

Tag: Cepheus

The Lion Nebula

Elephant’s Trunk Nebula