Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Serpens (Ser)  ·  Contains:  Eagle nebula  ·  M 16  ·  NGC 6611
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M16 Eagle Nebula's Pillars of Creation, Gilbert Ikezaki
M16 Eagle Nebula's Pillars of Creation
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M16 Eagle Nebula's Pillars of Creation

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
M16 Eagle Nebula's Pillars of Creation, Gilbert Ikezaki
M16 Eagle Nebula's Pillars of Creation
Powered byPixInsight

M16 Eagle Nebula's Pillars of Creation

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Description

The first time I saw NASA's Pillars of Creation poster in the 1990's, it blew me away. It sure didn't look like what I saw in the 1970's using a 5" Newtonian in my backyard as a teenager, or the pictures that other people took using a film DSLR while hand guiding with a 6x15 cross hair finder. In those days, if you were lucky, all you would see is a smudge. I had done a tiny bit of troubleshooting in the 1980's for the telemetry interface of the HST ground station computer complex for TRW (a NASA sub-contractor) when I worked at DEC (the computer manufacturer). The ground station used four VAX 11/780 computers that all together costed over $2.5M, and needed a huge air conditioned computer room. I thought you had to have a Hubble Space Telescope and a room full of computers. Taking this picture 30 years later was pretty exciting. With a telescope that, camera and all, costed me less than $4K, in the desert an hour from my house, and post processing using a $500 no name gaming computer from Costco discount store, I captured the pillars myself. Awesome!

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M16 Eagle Nebula's Pillars of Creation, Gilbert Ikezaki

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