The Elephant’s Trunk, (bottom) 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 Elephant’s Trunk nebula is now thought to be a site of star formation, containing several very young (less than 100,000 years) 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.
Mu Cephei, (top right), is a red supergiant or hypergiant star, located at the edge of the IC 1396 nebula and is visually nearly 100,000 times brighter than the Sun.
The deep red color of Mu Cephei was noted by William Herschel, who described it as “a very fine deep garnet colour, such as the periodical star ο Ceti”. It is thus commonly known as Herschel’s “Garnet Star”.
It is also one of the largest known stars with an estimated radius over 1,000 times that of the sun, and were it placed in the Sun’s position it would reach between the orbit of Jupiter and Saturn.
Technical info:
TS 80mm f6 APO triplet refractor
ZWO ASI 071 MC PRO – temp: -5c – gain 90
TS 0,79 reducer
Optolong L-eNhance dualband filter ( Ha-OIII)
iOPTRON CEM25P mount
ASIAIR Pro
Exposure – ~ 5 hours
Processed with Astro Pixel Processor (extract Ha-OIII and re-combine HOO) PS CS5