Elephant Trunk Nebula

by Adam Pender

Title

Elephant Trunk Nebula

Artist

Adam Pender

Medium

Photograph - Photograph

Description

This image of the Elephant's Trunk Nebula is the result of 5 nights of shooting with a 102mm aperture APO triplet refractor and specialized filters, with approximately 9 hours worth of 3 and 5 minute long individual frames aligned, normalized, and stacked using secialized astronomy imaging software. Note that this image is from a terrestrial location,NOT from the Hubble Space Telescope!

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 and its immediate surroundings; 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) in the top center of this image. The entire IC 1396 region is ionized by this 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.

Uploaded

October 3rd, 2021

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