Celestial Elephant Trunk
Here's a fascinating object in the constellation Cepheus, the King. This is just to the north of the constellation cygnus, the swan. It can be found directly overhead on warm summer evenings, but unfortunately, it's barely visible to the naked eye. I photographed this gem using narrowband filters, Oxygen-III, Sulfur-II and HydrogenAlpha from Baader. 
Each of these filters isolated a single emission (light) line from the nebula. I took these three images and combined them in photoshop, assigning each of them a color, OIII - blue, S2 - Red and HA - green, this is commonly referred to as the hubble palette. The color of this image should look somewhat familiar as that's what the hubble space telescope produces for public consumption. This is a grand total of 480 minutes of exposure time with my Tak E-160, Canon 350xt and Losmandy G11 mount. I also threw some difraction spikes onto the brighter stars for good measure. Can you make out the "elephant trunk" in the image? This "dark nebula" is simply a thick cloud of insterstellar "dust" pushing through an active area of Sulfur, Oxygen and Hydrogen Alpha. VDB142, as it is more commonly referred to, is not very visible at all under all but the most ideal of conditions.
