Elephant's Trunk Nebula

Date:	September 6, 2025 at 06:02:51 MDT

I made some progress on the Elephant’s Trunk Nebula last night. We had been at a ZFS reunion party earlier, so I didn’t start imaging right at astro dusk.

I had the imaging continue right up until astro dawn, knowing that I might get into “trouble”. Indeed, the final 27 frames were blocked by a tree. (27 × 45) = 1,215 seconds, or 20 minutes 15 seconds. So it went behind the tree at about 04:35. Thus, for this coming Monday, I could image up through 04:23 (4 minutes earlier per day). Astro dusk is 20:53.

Here is the first night and then the first+second night’s results:

It’s definitely getting brighter. I think I’ll try adding a third night before moving on to another target.

Update 2025-09-23: Bad weather interfered with my third night of data, so this is all I have up to now.