This is the Elephant's Trunk nebula, part of the much larger IC1396 in Cepheus. Captured from my back yard in July 2010 with my then newly-acquired Takahashi FSQ-106 and QSI583wsg CCD camera.

To cut through the light pollution, this was captured using a narrowband H-alpha filter, in this case a filter with a 7nm wide passband manufactured by Baader.

Although this is very effective in cutting down the light pollution, the resulting signal is extremely faint; from my rough calculations the brightest parts of this image represent 1 photon landing on each pixel every 5 seconds...

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