Night log · Sunday 11 October 2026

The Elephant's Trunk, after a false start

The plan

The forecast was mixed: one weather model cleared the sky from 21:00, another kept it patchy, a third had it overcast. With a 2% Moon it was worth a try, and worth trying something new: the Elephant's Trunk Nebula, IC 1396, in Cepheus.

IC 1396 is a huge, faint cloud of glowing hydrogen about 2,400 light years away, more than ten Moon-widths across in our sky. In the evening it climbs almost overhead, 84° up at 21:25, well clear of the house. The famous part is the "trunk": a column of dark dust and gas, several light years long, curling in from one side. Light from a hot young star at the nebula's centre is eating it away, and the edge facing that star glows. Inside the trunk new stars are still forming.

Planned: 20:30–00:00, IC 1396
Extended: to 05:00 on the night
Settings: 20 s · gain 200 · dual-band
Moon: New, 2%
Mount: TH10 wedge, EQ

A false start

I set the scope up, aligned it and went out for the evening. While it sat waiting for darkness, the telescope switched itself off. It turned out a power-saving setting in the phone app was on, and it shuts the scope down after a while with no one using the app. With me out, nobody could switch it back on, so the start of the night went by unused.

Back home at about 22:50 I switched it on again and turned that setting off. The first frames after the restart had smeared stars: the scope had forgotten its alignment when it powered down. Re-running the alignment in the app put that right, and from 23:11 every frame had round stars. The sky was clear, so we extended the night to 05:00.

Results

It stayed clear until 01:47. Then cloud drifted over, and the scope paused itself and waited, checking every few minutes. There was a short gap around 04:15, enough for another 20 minutes, before the cloud came back for good. At 05:00 it took its dark frames and parked itself.

Clear: 23:11–01:47, 04:15–04:40
IC 1396: 390 × 20 s · 2 h 10 min
Stacked: 388 frames · 30 darks
Lost to cloud: about 2 h 40 min

The whole field shows IC 1396 as a faint red haze with dark lanes of dust running through it. The orange star at top left is the Garnet Star (Mu Cephei), a red supergiant so large that, in place of the Sun, it would reach out towards the orbit of Jupiter. The blue-white star just below centre is the hot young star that lights the nebula, and the trunk curls in from the right of it.

IC 1396: a faint red nebula crossed by dark dust lanes, with the orange Garnet Star at top left and the dark Elephant's Trunk right of centre — IC 1396 · 388 × 20 s (2 h 9 min) · 30 darks · natural colour, with a gentle extra stretch to bring up the faint nebula

At full resolution the trunk itself is clear: a dark column of dust with a thin bright rim along its edge, where the starlight is boiling its surface away. It curls at the tip, which is where the "trunk" name comes from.

Close-up of the Elephant's Trunk: a dark curling column of dust with a glowing red rim, beside a blue-white star cluster — The Elephant's Trunk (vdB 142), cropped from the full-resolution image

Two hours is not much for a nebula this faint. It's a target that rewards many hours, so it's going on the list for another night, and the frames from different nights can be combined.

What changed

The power-saving setting is now off, and the toolkit can now read it directly to check before a night starts. Before I trust it with another evening out, we'll test it properly: leave the scope waiting for an hour with me at home and make sure it's still awake.