Image (merely enlarged from image above) obtained October 21-22, 2016 through RVO's Megrez 80mm refractor with Orion field-flattener lens, using a Baader-modified Canon XSi DSLR and BackyardEOS image-acquisition software – 23 carefully selected and stacked 300-second luminance frames combined with multiple dark, flat and bias calibration frames shot at ISO 1600 and totaling more than 315 minutes (115 minutes effective luminance) were used to create this image; optics driven by the Losmandy G-11 mount equipped with Ovision's precision RA worm gear, guided with a ZWO ASI 120MM Monochrome CCD camera through a 60mm guidescope using PhD2 guiding software and post-processed with DeepSkyStacker, Digital Development Process in Maxim DL Pro, NeatImage noise reduction and Photoshop CS3 s/w.

"The Elephant’s Trunk nebula is a site of star formation. Over 250 young stars in and around the Elephant’s Trunk are identified. Several very young (less than 100,000 years old) stars and two older (but still young, a couple of million 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."

[copyright Rabbit Valley Observatory/Willis Greiner, 2016 -- all rights reserved]