Date: July 21, 2008
Location: Victoria Centre Observatory

The Moon was 2 days past full and lit up the high haze in the sky causing severe light pollution (see the blue gradient on the right side of the image). Despite this, I took full advanage of the wide field-of-view my new Borg f/4 Astrograph to include most of this huge but faint nebula.

The colour of Herschel's Garnet Star is particularly striking (left side). The Elephant Trunk Nebula is nicely defined, and several dark nebula are visible but would be better defined if I had acquired more images to stack.

Details:
Optics: Hutech modified Canon XTi mounted prime focus on a Borg 101ED f/4 Astrograph, HEQ5 Pro EQ mount
Exposures: 18 images at 1 minute, ISO 800

Processing:
ImagesPlus 3.0: digital development of Canon Raw to FITS; dark & flat frames applied; auto grading & alignment; Sigma clipped average (2.55) used for stacking; aggressive Digital Development (BP 600, BG 192); subtle star size reduction; save as 48 bit TIF.
Corel PhotoPaint X3: Saturation increase; contrast stretch dark spectrum.
ACDSee Pro 2: Crop rigth side (blue light pollution); convert 48 bit to 24 bit RGB, resize and save to jpg.