M16, the Eagle Nebula in SHO (Richard Francis)

Celestial hemisphere: Southern · Constellation: Serpens (Ser) · Contains: Eagle Nebula · IC 4703 · LBN 67 · LBN 68 · M 16 · NGC 6611 · Sh2-49 · Star Queen · Star Queen nebula

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M16, the Eagle Nebula in SHO

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M16, the Eagle Nebula in SHO

M16, the Eagle Nebula, is relatively badly placed in the sky for me. It transits at local midnight in late June when the full night is less than 4 hours long, and even then it only reaches an elevation of about 32 degrees. I took this image between late August and early September and the average airmass for the subframes was 2.8, so quite a lot of atmosphere. Some of the subs I used were at pretty low altitude, down to 11 degrees. But there are quite a lot of them: about 50 subs of 300 sec per filter.

So the image is a bit soft.

The Eagle Nebula hosts one of the most well-known objects in popular astronomy: the Hubble image known as the "Pillars of Creation". It's much less striking in my rendition of it! This part of the Eagle Nebula is also known as the "Star Queen". An apparently small open cluster (it actually has over 8000 stars) is embedded in the nebula and star-forming is still going on in the dust and gas of the nebula, famously including the Pillars of Creation.

The Eagle Nebula and its star cluster are 5700 light years away, so naturally the extended obects in it are of impressive size. The leftmost "pillar", not very promient in my image, is about 4 light years in length; the distance from us to our nearest stellar neighbour.

UK Astro-Imaging
Astrophotographes (France)
Narrowband imaging
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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5184030
PixInsight job	5VGY0YPDX4LBFWWQ5931FEAYV66DM0MQ
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	18h18m47s.727
RA (top/left)	18h20m59s.999
RA (top/right)	18h16m36s.605
RA (bottom/right)	18h16m35s.316
RA (bottom/left)	18h20m59s.999

Dec (center)	-13°49′25″.36
Dec (top/left)	-13°17′24″.99
Dec (top/right)	-13°17′21″.90
Dec (bottom/right)	-14°21′28″.12
Dec (bottom/left)	-14°21′29″.69

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M16, the Eagle Nebula in SHO

M16, the Eagle Nebula in SHO

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