PILLARS of CREATION

Three towers of gas and dust, standing light-years tall, are giving birth to new stars, buried within their dusty spires.
The Pillars of Creation are a fascinating but relatively small feature of the entire Eagle Nebula, which spans 70 by 55 light-years.
The leftmost pillar is about four light years tall and the finger-like protrusions at the top of the clouds are larger than the Solar System.
The pillars are bathed in the scorching ultraviolet light from a cluster of young stars surrounding the structure. The winds from these stars are slowly eroding the towers of gas and dust.
The nebula, discovered in 1745 by the Swiss astronomer Jean-Philippe Loys de Chéseaux, is located 7,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Serpens.

THE IMAGE

I originally collaborated with my good friend at 'Russell's Astrophotography' to produce our 'M16 The Eagle Nebula' image...
Having done several edits to that joint project and extracted the maximum amount of detail possible I had not bothered to revisit my own Esprit 100ed data...
The release of the 'BlurXterminator' script for Pixinsight (shout out to Russell Croman) changed all that as now superb deconvolution of linear images by AI is possible on the PC.
Like many others, I now find myself slowly re-editing my library of images and digging out. what was effectively, redundant data!

This SHO image was stacked in WBPP (with Drizzle Integration) then Cropped and Deconvoluted by BlurX as separate  Sii, Ha and Oiii stacks.
After applying the sharpening a calibrated HistogramTransformation stretch was done and the stars were removed using StarXTerminator.
After combining the stacks various Curves Transformations were completed, mainly using colour masks, before porting to Photoshop for layers work.
Stars were put back using Pixinsight and some more colour mask work completed.
A small amount of noise reduction was done at the end using NoiseXTerminator. 

My main aim with this image was to draw the eye of the observer through the huge dust lanes towards the Pillars.
To achieve this I avoided using bright blue Oiii at the centre, as I had done before; but added more subtle shading, coming forwards, to hopefully add depth...

I've deliberately mentioned the 3 RC Astro scripts that helped to make this image possible, without the superb work of Russell Croman I literally would not have been able to make this image to my satisfaction... his scripts have been a game changer for me...

Our hobby is amazing and I keep wondering how much more excitement lies ahead...

Clear Skies ‼️
Olly