In the center is M16, the Eagle Nebula, and on the left is M17, the Swan Nebula. They're both gorgeous nebulae among many in the heart of the Milky Way. Both are emission nebulae, meaning that they largely consist of clouds of hydrogen that is energized by the hot, young stars within and emits a characteristic red glow. The Eagle Nebula is home to the famous "Pillars of Creation" structure, which is probably the most well-known Hubble Space Telescope image. They're a little hard to see here being so zoomed out, but alas, they are there! (I've got a more-zoomed-in version from my much-larger telescope coming later on).

This is the result of an ongoing experiment to pair my ZWO ASI294MC Pro with a camera lens! My 50-200mm Nikon zoom lens is surprisingly decent -- a fair amount of field curvature (I actually had to stop it down about halfway), but not very much chromatic aberration (the least of all of my camera lenses, actually). I'm using an Orion SkyGlow filter, which I think is more of a visual light pollution filter than a photographic one, but I recently got my hot little hands on another Astronomik CLS-CCD filter that I have now placed in the image train instead for future images that should do *much* better on the color balance. Using the ZWO 294 is just like using a modified DSLR, since it doesn't have a spectrum filter like DSLRs do that filters out a lot of red, but with the bonus that it's cooled!

Details:

Date: 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 28 June 2020

Location: East Bay area backyard, CA

Object: M16 Eagle Nebula

Attempt: 7

Camera: ZWO ASI294MC Pro

Telescope: Nikon 50-200mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 200mm, f/something

Accessories: Orion SkyGlow filter

Mount: Celestron AVX

Guide scope: Orion 50mm mini-guider

Guide camera: QHY5

Subframes: 157x180s

Gain/ISO: 120

Acquisition method: Sequence Generator Pro

Stacking program: PixInsight 1.8.8-5

Post-Processing program: PixInsight 1.8.8-5

Darks: 100

Biases: 0

Flats: 0

Temperature: -20C