M16 Eagle Nebula and the Pillars of Creation (Joe Niemeyer)

Celestial hemisphere: Southern · Constellation: Serpens (Ser) · Contains: Eagle Nebula · IC 4703 · M 16 · NGC 6611 · Star Queen

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M16 Eagle Nebula and the Pillars of Creation

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M16 Eagle Nebula and the Pillars of Creation

This is my image of the incredible Eagle Nebula (Messier 16) and Pillars of Creation as featured in the famous 1995 Hubble Telescope image. I color mapped this image the same way the Hubble team did as an homage to their work. The 1995 image, with its false color mapping for scientific purposes, captured the world's attention and awe of the beauty of the cosmos. It provided never before seen protostar details that greatly improved our understanding of star formation. This nebula is approximately 5,700 light years from Earth in the constellation Serpens. The entire nebula spans 70 by 55 light years and the iconic pillars in the center are 4 to 5 light years long. The dust columns are active star forming regions which are bathed in scorching ultraviolet light from the star cluster above. The cluster is estimated to contain about 8,100 young stars that are only 1 to 2 million years old. I am pretty happy with this image from my telescope that costs about $10 Billion less than the Hubble!

I made this image from 45 300-second exposures through my Baader dual-bandpass filter (Hα and OIII) at 2312mm prime focal length, calibrated with 20 each dark, flat, and dark flat frames. I stacked the frames with Astro Pixel Processor, extracting the Ha and Oiii data into separate stacks. I mapped Ha to the green channel and Oiii to the red and blue channels. Color corrections were then made to each channel in order to achieve the Hubble SHO palette. The stack was then post-processed with Photoshop utilizing the StarXTerminator, Astronomy Tools, and Topaz DeNoise AI plugins.

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	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
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Professional, scientific grade data
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Unknown

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

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Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
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Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5071140
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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M16 Eagle Nebula and the Pillars of Creation

M16 Eagle Nebula and the Pillars of Creation

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M16 Eagle Nebula and the Pillars of Creation

M16 Eagle Nebula and the Pillars of Creation

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