M16 Pillars of Star Creation (Ray Johnson)

M16 Pillars of Star Creation

M16, The Eagle Nebula, has long been a target of interest to amateurs. Most of us have been inspired by the astonishing Hubble images of this star forming region.

This is the best data that I could find in my archives, coming from a couple nights of very good seeing in 2017. I have many sequences of this target, but none is as good as this old dataset. The following description is my best recollection of how I refined the processing over the years. Many of the operations were performed some years ago.

113/167 x 120s Ha data subs were selected on the basis of FWHM below 2.4 arc seconds and all 31x300s O111 subs were used. The processing was conventional in that the stars were treated separately from the nebula. A reliable star map was established by removing the stars using hand cloning in the Ha and O111 images. The stars were isolated by subtracting the starless Ha image from the original and a star map was generated by dilating the resulting star image.

Maximum detail was extracted from the original Ha and O111 images using deconvolution followed by a multiscale linear transform. No unrealistic/AI sharpening was used. The stretched and sharpened Ha and O111 images were blended using the Hubble palette and the Ha was also used as a luminance channel. The desaturated Ha stars were inserted into the resulting image and some minor haloing and unwanted colour was tidied up using Rick's colour mask in Pixinsight.

Final colour balancing was carried out using curves and saturation and the goal was to present the pillars and the nearby background in colours as close as possible to the original Hubble image. As a final step, the image was upscaled by 1.2, since it appeared to hold together fairly well under this operation and seemed to me to have more impact at the larger scale.

Original
B
Final
C

	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
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Mix of multiple sources
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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5853915
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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