Messier 16 - The Eagle Nebula.

M16, known most commonly as the Eagle Nebula, it is also known as the Star Queen Nebula and the Spire. It is a rich open cluster of about 8100 stars surrounded by a rich region of gas and dust. Located towards the south during the summer season, M16 can be seen in the constellation Serpens, and is located about 5100 light years away. The names have to do the darker structures in the center of the nebula. This area has been made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope classic image: The Pillars of Creation.

The first time I shot this was last October, when I was just starting out in Astrophotography. I was eager to try this one again to see if I was able to improve on it.

I have been working on my automation and I was all set to have the scope acquire the target, center on it, focus the camera and startup the guider all on its own. I went to bed! I set a timer to check on it and it was a good thing I did - as my Sequence Generator Pro software was failing to plate solve the star field. Hmmm - this had not happened before - but it caused the start of my series to be late. I restarted the software and suddenly all was good. I was aiming for 2+ hours of exposure integration but instead ended up with 29 2-minute exposures - Less than half of what I wanted - before M16 set into the trees at my location. UPDATE: I went back on 6-18-20 and added another 50 2 minute subs to the image now shown).

So I worked with this data - call it preliminary - to produce this image. My plan is to go out tonight and get another couple of hours of data and see how far I can take it!

Summary: This image resulted from 29 x 120 second captures. Captured with a William Optics 132 mm FLT APO scope on an IOptron CEM60 mount. Camera was a ZWO ASI294MC-Pro. Capture was done using Sequence Generator Pro and PHD2 Guiding. Processing was with DeepSky Stacker, Pixinsight, and Photoshop.