This beautiful nebula of hydrogen gas and dust is a stellar nursery that host many young stars in the constellation of Cepheus. It is the large IC 1396 emission nebula complex. Within the nebula is located the Elephant Trunck Nebula.
The IC 1396 is about 3,000 light years distant.

This image was chosen as NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day for September 8, 2005.

Remarkable features Click the image to view and interact with the hi-res image. m Cephei is a red star with color index of 2.35 and a visual magnitude of 4.08. 13 Cephei is a nice blue star, with a visual magnitude of 5.80, so barely visible at nacked eye from a dark site.   Find Chart The position of IC1396 and the Elephant Trunk Nebula (in the red circle) in Cepheus. Image from Cartes du Ciel.

This image is a composite from black and white images taken with the Palomar Observatory's 48-inch (1.2-meter) Samuel Oschin Telescope as a part of the second National Geographic Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS II). The images were recorded on two type of glass photographic plates - one sensitive to red light and the other to blue and later they were digitized. Credit: Caltech, Palomar Observatory, Digitized Sky Survey.

In order to produce the color image seen here, I worked with a total of 72 different frames, 36 for each color band, coming from 8 different plates taken between 1989 and 1993. Original file is 12,954x15,650 pixels with a resolution of about 1 arcsec per pixel. The image show an area of sky large 3.6° x 4.3° (for comparison, the full-Moon is about 0.5° in diameter).
Color composite, copyright: Davide De Martin.

Other images of the same celestial field found online

• http://www.ngc7000.org/ccd/ic1396-20040908-hahagb.jpg by Ole Nielsen;
• http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~whwang/gallery/picutres/ic1396-large.jpg by Wei-Hao Wang;
• http://members.inode.at/wasshuber/gallery/ic1396-2.htm by Manfred Wasshuber.