IC1396 is 2400 light years approximately, it is a region of Hydrogen where stars form, this image is the first of the month as the cloud gods decided England needed more clouds.
The cloud of gas has many features with probably the most famous the Elephant trunk nebula which can be seen center bottom of the image, these structures will become many stars and when a star ignites the cloud of gas will be lit up and forced outwards causing a cavity in the gas cloud, this will eventually lead the end of the gas cloud.
The image was shot with a Canon 600d (a decade old tech) a rather nice Canon 200mm F2.8 which is a nice lens and on a relatively cheap tracking mount (AZ GTI - SKYWATCHER). Taking of deep space objects requires many images stacked into one image, this is done to reduce image noise which makes it look grainy, 118 images of 1 min duration where used to make this image.
Sirilic stacking program is used to combine the images and edited in siril, both free software and rather powerful , it allows you to stretch the image and colour calibrate plus many more cools things.
I will hopefully get another clear night this week and get my imaging telescope out, hope you enjoyed my image and subscribe to see more random stuff i make and photograph.
