Growing up just outside of the Smokies, I feel like there are a lot of nice overlooks.  It wasn’t until I started exploring these deep space objects, however, that I realized we have a lot of overlooks that face south and east, but very very few that fast west and north…and the ones that do are looking directly at cities.  For sunsets that’s not that big of a deal really, but for night sky objects where you need as dark of skies as you can find… well… that’s a different story.

Last fall while I was exploring around looking for pretty fall colors, I happened to notice that one the Foothills Parkway East (way up on Cosby) overlooks has a nice view West and North, and low and behold, no city!  And bonus, there lies a nicely shaped mountain right in the path of a really cool deep space object as it sets.

The object featured in this week’s Picture of the Week is known as the Elephant Trunk nebula, or IC 1396.  The elephant trunk specifically is the – trunk – that reaches up and left toward the darker blue “center” area of the nebula (the trunk itself has a yellow / orange color to it in this image), though to me, the entire thing looks like an elephant trunk if you were looking down one nostril.  This image was captured at 300mm, so by comparison, the full moon would fit well inside that dark blue area that appears to be in the center of the nebula – this particular object is MASSIVE.

As I was working on the image, I split out the various color channels of the image with the stars subtracted, and it struck me how gorgeous the nebulosity was just in black and white.  The tones, to me, are striking.  Below is an image of just that in the Alternative Perspectives section.

More next week!

–Dan Thompson