M16, The Eagle and Pillars of Creation (Crop) (Rick Veregin)

M16, The Eagle and Pillars of Creation (Crop)

Same image but with a crop that I liked to zoom in on the action.

The Hubble Space Telescope made The Eagle and embedded Pillars of Creation, this amazing star forming region, an iconic image. In fact, the HST imaged it twice, 1995 and twenty years later in 2015, showing that significant changes are occurring in the pillars, the Bok globules and EGGs (Evaporating Gaseous Globules), the latter small knots of ionized gas scattered around the edges of the pillars.

The image source is the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Robotic Telescope

Time July 2019

Location Sierra Remote Observatories, Aubery, California

Telescope RCOS 16" f/8.9 (3550mm focal length)

CCD Camera SBIG STX16803 16MP (4096 x 4096)

Mount Paramount ME

Filters Ha (7nm), OIII (8.5nm), SII (8nm)

Exposures SII=13x30m, Ha=15x30m, OIII=12x30m, total=20 h

I registered and stacked the raw data in DSS, with flats, biases and darks.

Using StarTools, I found SHO (60+40, 30+30+40,100) gave me a good balance for each channel. In Photoshop, I further tweaked color for that gold/blue HST coloring, with just a hint of green.

This was my first go at a starless image using Starnet++. I found it worked very well, though bright stars and some star halos needed more work manually to remove them properly. This was also my first go with Topaz AI DeNoise, which I had as a trial. It worked exceptionally well. I used mostly noise reduction, but even so, the detail improved very dramatically. I have since purchased it since it is on sale (for a few days longer, for anyone who is keen to get it).

The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Robotic Telescope
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