M16 the Eagle Nebula and the Pillars...

It is a bit unclear for me why, in so many years of imaging, never tried M16 the Eagle Nebula. Maybe the only reason is that there are so many interesting targets and the limitation of time...

Anyway, this season I decided to image it and I devoted three nights to gather data.

The Eagle Nebula, also known as Messier 16 or NGC 6611, is one of the most famous and visually stunning star-forming regions in our galaxy. It is located about 7000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Serpens. The Eagle Nebula is a young open cluster of stars within a vast cloud of interstellar gas and dust.

A region of the Eagle Nebula became a true astronomical icon thanks to images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (First captured in 1995 and later revisited in higher resolution in subsequent years). This region was named "The Pillars of Creation" and has been widely known ever since.

These pillars are towering columns of dense molecular hydrogen gas and dust that rise as monolithic structures within the nebula. Each pillar is several light-years long and serves as a stellar nursery.

I planned the image to offer different perspectives of the nebula, and in the end I decided to make three different images: one in “true” colour (RGB), one in narrowband with the Hubble palette (SHO) and one, of higher resolution, to show the maximum detail of the Pillars (without stars).

The first image on the right is a pure RGB composition taken with the FSQ-106N telescope and an STL-11000M camera. The total exposure time is 8.5 hours and the image scale is 3.5 arcseconds per pixel.

The second image is taken with narrowband filters, Halpha, OIII and SII, which have been combined with the so-called Hubble "SHO" Palette (which assigns to the red channel the SII filter, to the green channel the Ha filter and to the blue channel the OIII filter). It is taken with the TOA-150 telescope and my second camera STL-11000M. The total exposure time is 20 hours and in this case, the image scale is 1.69 arcseconds per pixel.

For the colour calibration I have followed the method indicated by Vicent Peris and I have used the ColorCalibration module of Pixinsight (although later I have made changes to adapt the result to my personal taste). In this image, the stars are RGB.

The third image is also a narrowband image with the same original data as the second one but with a special processing to try to show the maximum detail (achievable with my 150 mm scope) in the Pillars.

To achieve this goal, I decided to use a) starless version (to concentrate attention on the Pillars...) and b) drizzle integration x2. Image scale in this case is 0.85 arcseconds per pixel.

Click on the images for a full resolution version, or go to the Gallery section for complete exposure details.

Image processing: Pixinsight.

Observatory automation and remote operation with Talon6.