A 2 panel mosaic: M16 SER Eagle Nebula + M17 SAG Swan/Omega Nebula = A flock of … birds
It’s nearly the end of summer, and very soon, the birds will start trekking south again. At my latitude (51 degrees north) these birds tend to fly very low to the horizon, barely reaching 23 degrees and going as deep as 17 degrees, before they disappear behind buildings and glaring flood lights. With barely 2 hours for each respective image, I managed to combine these separate images into a ‘group’-foto, a mosaic, showing the Eagle, the Swan and a host of other sharpless objects surrounding them. I also had made an image of M24, going even lower, but the quality just wasn’t good enough to combine it in this mosaic …
M16 The
Eagle Nebula (also catalogued as
NGC 6611, and also known as the
Star Queen Nebula) is a young
open cluster of
stars in the
constellationSerpens. Both the "Eagle" and the "Star Queen" refer to visual impressions of the dark silhouette near the center of the nebula, an area made famous as the "
Pillars of Creation" imaged by the
Hubble Space Telescope. The
nebula contains several active
star-forminggas and dust regions, including the aforementioned Pillars of Creation. The Eagle Nebula lies in the
Sagittarius Arm of the
Milky Way.
M17, called the Omega or Swan Nebula, is considered one of the brightest and most massive star-forming regions of our galaxy. Its local geometry is similar to the
Orion Nebula except that it is viewed edge-on rather than face-on. It is between 5,000 and 6,000
light-years from
Earth and it spans some 15 light-years in diameter. The cloud of
interstellar matter of which this
nebula is a part is roughly 40 light-years in diameter and has a mass of 30,000 solar masses. The total
mass of the Omega Nebula is an estimated 800
solar masses.
TS94, ASI2600MC, EQ6R-Pro, L-Enhance
M16 48x 180s = 2:24 20220722-20220724 Astrobin:
https://astrob.in/zdlg4g/0/M17 28x 180s = 1:54 20220729-20220818 Astrobin:
https://astrob.in/mnkwn8/0/More integration time with the birds would’ve been lovely, but it was just too difficult to catch them between the clouds on the horizon and the light pollution. Perhaps not 100% perfect as an image, but the fact that I managed to catch these birds and join them in a mosaic, gives me the satisfaction I was hoping for …
Clear Skies everybody! 🤩✨🔭
Follow me @astrowaut
Comments