I recently completed this new image of IC1396, the “Elephant’s Trunk Nebula” using narrowband filters and the fairly short focal length Star71 telescope.  Another version of this, from almost a year ago, was done at much higher magnification and shows just the portion that gives the nebula its name – the top center of this image.

The bright red star in the lower left corner is known as the “Garnet Star” and it really is very red, but its appearance is a bit of a fluke in this image:  As is always the case with narrowband images, the colors in this image are “false” – assigned arbitrarily with no regard to the true colors.  But it happened that at the time I was capturing the sulfur II image the sky was a bit hazy, so this star had a large halo around it.  In the final image, the sulfur II data defines the red color, so we see a bright red halo around the star.

At this time of year (at my location) IC1396 doesn’t get high enough above the horizon to shoot until about midnight, so I’ve been up very late for the last 4 nights.  Hopefully, I can get a good night’s sleep tonight!