Messier 16 (NGC 6611) The Eagle Nebula
Located in the constellation Serpens is a dark star forming nebula region that somewhat resembles an eagle in flight. After reading Andews article about this object, I couldn’t resist paying it a visit using the Stellacam II even though it was nearly 2am. I could see the faint dark outline of the bird on the notebook monitor so I tweaked focus a bit, and then took about 150 images before shutting down for the evening.
Image taken from the light polluted skies in Louisville, CO with Celestorn Nexstar11, F3.3 focal reducer, and Stellacam II video camera set at 9/14 gain, medium gamma, and integration at 128 (4 sec). Images were dark subtracted, flat field and bias corrected with ImagePlus. Registax3 used to align and stack the images. ImagePlus and Photoshop used to enhance, crop etc. The sky was clear, no wind, temperature was 55°F, transparency was very good, and turblence was 6/14.
June 28th, 2006 at 12:02 am
Wow… nice. You’re totally rockin’ it lately.
June 28th, 2006 at 2:05 pm
I agree with Rob,you are getting some great shots!.
July 27th, 2006 at 12:53 pm
[…] I decided to revist M16, the Eagle Nebula, in constellation Serpens last evening. We haven’t had any clear sky here in the Denver area for some time now, so it was nice to do some imaging for a change. Image was taken with Canon 300D Rebel with 2 minute exposure. That was not near long enough exposure for this object, it just barely shows up in the raw images. I’ll need to use 3 or maybe even 4 minute exposure next time. My previous effort with the Stellacam2 was better. The image was created from a stack of 10 images, I’ll need to increase that to maybe 20 next time to reduce the noise. […]