The Elephant’s Trunk Nebula is a concentration of interstellar gas and dust within the much larger ionized gas region IC 1396 located in the constellation Cepheus about 2,400 light years away from Earth. To find the location of this deep-sky object, look toward the Garnet Star (Mu Cephei), the bright star in the top right.

Rising from the bottom of the image, the Elephant’s Trunk Nebula is thought to be a site of star formation, containing several very young (less than 100,000 yr) stars that were discovered in infrared images in 2003. Two older (but still young, a couple of million years, by the standards of stars, which live for billions of years) stars are present in a small, circular cavity in the head of the globule.

IC 1396 contains a number of globules similar to the Elephant’s Trunk, differing in size and shape. These appear as black silhouettes positioned against the nebula’s bright clouds of gas.