As Spring turns to Summer, targets nearer the centre of the Milky Way rise higher in the northern night sky. Particularly iconic is the Eagle Nebula with the “Pillars of Creation”, made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope. It is catalogued as NGC 6611 or Messier 16, M16, and is located in the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way. At nearly 6000 ly distance, it is an unusually bright nebula (apparent magnitude 6.4) due to the extensive star forming regions it contains. The cluster associated with the Nebula has approximately 8100 stars. The image is based around the so called “SHO” colour palette, with the hydrogen-alpha emission being mapped to blue green and the sulphur-II emission to yellow. The image contains data from an I´ near IR photometric filter, which is mapped to red in the final image. The image was taken from a dark sky region in northeastern Spain.
Celestron RASA 11″
10Micron GM1000 HPS
SIGMA fp (monochrome) / SIGMA fp L (colour)
H-alpha / S-II ultra-fast narrowband filters,
I´ photometric filter
ca. 3 hrs, ISO 1600, F2.2, 620mm