IC1396 – Elephant's Trunk Nebula in H-alpha and OIII
The Elephant’s Trunk Nebula is rich in color when captured using narrowband filters. Although I image with a duo-narrowband filter and a one-shot color (OSC) camera, dedicating 12 hours of total exposure allowed me to extract usable oxygen data to some extent.
Inspired by Adam Block and his NB Fast-track educational materials, I combined both my prior knowledge and the new insights I gained. This led to the creation of an image in golden and blue tones, which I find visually pleasing.
I want to extend my gratitude to Adam for the inspiration and for encouraging me to transition towards mono-imaging. I'd also like to thank my fellow astrophotographer Gleb Deykalo for his constructive feedback throughout the data acquisition and processing stages. His deeper understanding of the night sky helped me keep the image both reasonable and visually harmonious.
One interesting thing I'd like to mention about the processing of this
astrophotography: during the star removal process, my oxygen data contained
entities that initially appeared to be artifacts from the star removal. As
someone with a photography background, my first instinct was to clean them up,
but common sense urged me to double-check. Using
Franklin Marek's What's In My Image script, I verified
that these “artifacts” were actually planetary