orin stepanek wrote: ↑Thu Jun 08, 2023 4:49 pm
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Gotta love the Elephant's trunk!
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This guys kinda cute!
Thanks for posting the closeups of the "guy", Orin. I agree it looks like a guy and not like an elephant's trunk!
I think there is star formation going on in the "head" of the "guy". Stars are peaking out in his "eye".
Elephant's Trunk and Caravan.
Image Credit & Copyright: Steve Cannistra (StarryWonders)
I should have been more enthusiastic about this picture than I was yesterday, because it is an RGB image, and that's what I want, right? Admittedly, when it comes to pictures of emission nebulas, RGB images tend to make them look unrelentingly red in a way that I sometimes find overwhelming. Yes, but they
are red, too, because of the very dominant red light of hydrogen alpha, and images like this APOD is a good reminder of that!
(Yes, yes, Chris, I know you insist that emission nebulas are gray, not red, because they look gray and not red through a telescope. But they
would look red and not gray if the human color vision was several magnitudes more sensitive than it is.)
Anyway. The multiple central O-type star, HD 206267, looks nicely blue in the APOD. Also note little flecks of blue on the Elephant Trunk pillar itself, which are little reflection nebulas.
And I have to admit that narrowband imagery brings out more details in pictures of emission nebulas than RGB photography typically does. So here is a narrowband picture of the Elephant Trunk Nebula:
The image doesn't seem to open, but you can see it if you click on the little "no image" icon.
Most of the dust in the Elephant Trunk Nebula is just "flying around", kind of thin and unfocused, as if it was ignoring the power of the central star. Most of the dust structures don't point at the central star and don't have bright rims. But you can find a few bright-rimmed little pillars near the perimeter of the image, which do feel the influence of the hot bright star.
Do take a look at this picture by Steve Cannistra:
The Elephant Trunk Nebula and the Flying Bat Nebula. Credit: Steve Cannistra.
Note all the dark dust all around the Elephant Trunk Nebula, especially above and to the right of it. The Elephant Trunk Nebula has formed in a "river" of gas and dust.
There is far less dust in and near the Flying Bat Nebula. The nebula itself looks much like an empty shell, whereas the Elephant Trunk Nebula looks much more "filled". The multiple O9.5IV central star of the Flying bat Nebula, HD 202214, is cooler than the O6V-type central star of the Elephant Trunk Nebula, but it is surrounded by a highly elongated and mysterious almost pure OIII nebula, Ou4.
And Mu Cephei, if you're wondering, is an unusually deep red supergiant star, also known as the Garnet Star.
Do check out
this page, where you can see a whole bunch of Elephant Trunk Nebula pictures!
And do check out
this almost 5 MB picture of the Elephant Trunk Nebula. The Elephant Trunk itself looks like a meditating saint with half-closed eyes and wings on his back, basking in the light from - well, from the star HD 206267!
Ann
Elephant's Trunk and Caravan
