Last week I posted an image of whats known as the Elephant Trunk Nebula. It is actually just a small part of a giant emission nebula with the catalog name IC 1396. The entire nebula is so big its apparent size is about 50 times that of the moon. Why cant you see it then? Because it is much too faint. It is too big to image the entire nebula with the Kitt Peak 4-meter telescope, where we can only see about 5% of the nebula at a time. But we did image several parts of it. This is an image from the southeastern part of the nebula. Enjoy the full-resolution version, where you can see all sorts of interesting details within. Ill post pictures of other parts of the nebula later this week.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Apr 2014 18:12:51 +0000
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