The 'Elephants Trunk': Part of IC 1396.
Distance: 1500 light years
.


Amanda took one look at this and said...'you've found God!'
In this orientation, it does rather look like a gigantic one eyed old man, beard and all!!
In our house it will always be known as the 'God nebula'

This took a while in the processing stage, as I was a bit lax at aligning the scope for my different subs.
This meant that the Hb and OIII images were quite heavily cropped.
I liked the overall framing of the region in the Ha image though, so have rebuilt the cropped areas....you can still see the join, but only just!

Click on image below for full size version
Scope was the WO ZS80FD with a celestron 0.63x reducer
Camera, Atik 16HR

16 x Ha @ 360 seconds (15 subs were unusable due to guiding issues)
10 each of OIII and H-beta @ 240 seconds binned 2x2
Ha was used as both luminance and red.
OIII was green and H beta, blue.

Total imaging time: 2 hours 53 minutes