Bad ass.

That's a spectacular image, deathcow! Well done indeed.
Reminds me of the new Hubble images NASA released a few days ago..
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/hubble_gallery/

Thanks, both. I did see those Hubble and am suitably blown away : ) Here is my full elephant trunk
http://www.pbase.com/mclemens1969/image/116390451/original

"Here is my full elephant trunk [link to picture]"

This scares me just a wee bit.

Beautiful picture though, dc.

Wow.

Very cool! What was happening around the Earth when the light left the nebula.

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Really lovely. Is the purple color really there, or part of post-processing?

Anything where these insanely, insanely dim objects show color can be though of as an artifact of processing. If you google IC1396 you'll see it portrayed in many color schemes, usually flat-out red. I dont think I've seen it like this before. Really I just turned up the saturation a lot as opposed to faking the colors.

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That's a shame, because in my science fiction vision of the future, I would be cruising along in my space Winnebago with that as a back-drop, but I guess it would mainly be a lot of black, with little pinpoints of white.

Space Winnebagos have hyper saturation color drive. (Duh)