View allAll Photos Tagged pillarsofcreation
Blend of early blue hour foreground and sky from up on the bluff above this area as it got to astro-dark. Sky single tracked 3 minutes, f/4, iso 640
Catalogued as IC 4703, NGC 6611 and Messier 16, the Eagle Nebula in the constellation Serpens and associated open star cluster that illuminates it are among the most striking features of the deep sky. The dark star-forming pillars within are dense areas of gas and dust. This was a tricky target from my Colchester back garden, being low in the northern sky between neighbouring shrubbery. I stacked the best 70% of about 3.3 hours of 10" images over two nights in late June (when it hardly gets dark), taken at Gain 300 on the ASI585MC through a ZWO UV/IR cut filter. Sky-Watcher Explorer 150P on EQ5 Pro, unguided. Processed in AstroPixelProcessor, Lightroom and Photoshop.
The Eagle Nebula, also known as Messier 16 (M16), is a star-forming region located about 5,700 light-years from Earth in the constellation Serpens Cauda. It was made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope's image of the "Pillars of Creation," which are towering columns of gas and dust where new stars are being born.
Image taken on 9 August 2025
----------
Camera/ Telescope Seestar S50 in EQ mode
LP filter
327 20-second exposures
Frames stacked and processed in Pixinsight
Captions added with Photoshop CS4
These eerie, dark pillar-like structures are columns of cool interstellar hydrogen gas and dust that are also incubators for new stars. The pillars protrude from the interior wall of a dark molecular cloud like stalagmites from the floor of a cavern. They are part of the "Eagle Nebula" (also called M16 -- the 16th object in Charles Messier's 18th century catalog of "fuzzy" objects that aren't comets), a nearby star-forming region 7,000 light-years away in the constellation Serpens. Ultraviolet light is responsible for illuminating the convoluted surfaces of the columns and the ghostly streamers of gas boiling away from their surfaces, producing the dramatic visual effects that highlight the three dimensional nature of the clouds. The tallest pillar (left) is about a light-year long from base to tip. As the pillars themselves are slowly eroded away by the ultraviolet light, small globules of even denser gas buried within the pillars are uncovered. These globules have been dubbed "EGGs." EGGs is an acronym for "Evaporating Gaseous Globules," but it is also a word that describes what these objects are. Forming inside at least some of the EGGs are embryonic stars, stars that abruptly stop growing when the EGGs are uncovered and they are separated from the larger reservoir of gas from which they were drawing mass. Eventually, the stars themselves emerge from the EGGs as the EGGs themselves succumb to photoevaporation. The picture was taken on April 1, 1995 with the Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. The color image is constructed from three separate images taken in the light of emission from different types of atoms. Red shows emission from singly-ionized sulfur atoms. Green shows emission from hydrogen. Blue shows light emitted by doubly- ionized oxygen atoms.
Narrow band: [SII], Halpha, and [OIII]
RedCat71mm+ ZWO533MM+Skywatcher HEQ5
Reduced in PixInsight and Photoshop.
A deep-sky view of M16, the iconic Eagle Nebula, highlighting the legendary "Pillars of Creation" at its core. The processing emphasizes the intricate details of the interstellar gas and dust clouds where new stars are actively being born.
NGC6611, Messier 16, Sharpless 49, RCW 165, Cr 375, Gum 83 or simply the Eagle nebula is perhaps the most widely known nebula among non-astronomers. The region known as the Pillars of Creation became famous in 1995, when it was imaged by Jeff Hester and Paul Scowen using the Hubble Space Telescope.
While the pillars themselves take the central stage, there is plenty going on around them. This whole region is illuminated by the light of the open cluster (NGC 6611) of young, hot stars. It is surrounded by a large H II region (IC 4703), which is located around 7000 light years away.
The brightest start in the Eagle nebular (HD 168076) is a binary system consisting of an O3.5V star and an O7.5V companion. The star has roughly 80 solar masses and luminosity up to 1 million times brighter than that of Sun.
Image taken in Bortle 1 skies of Namibia, with Takahashi Epsilon 180ED on iOptron CEM70-EC2 mount, with ZWO ASI6200MM Pro and Antlia Highspeed 3nm Ha, OIII, and SII filters.
The Pillars of Creation are visible!
Integration Time: About 2 hours 15 minutes
ISO: 1600
Stacked in DSS
Levels Stretching and Curves in PS + Camera Raw adjustments
The Eagle Nebula sits around 7,000 light years away in the constellation Serpens, a vast region of gas and dust where new stars are actively forming. At its heart lies the young open cluster NGC 6611, whose intense radiation sculpts the surrounding nebula, including the famous "Pillars of Creation" visible near the centre of this image, and the "Stellar Spire" rising below them.
This is a narrowband image mapped to the classic SHO (Hubble) palette, with sulphur, hydrogen and oxygen assigned to red, green and blue. What surprised me here was just how much OIII the core is putting out; that blue-white glow around the central cluster is doubly ionised oxygen, wrapped in golden shells of hydrogen and sulphur.
Captured with the Askar 120 APO with 0.8x reducer and ZWO ASI2600MC Pro, using Askar Colour Magic D1/D2 duo-narrowband filters, from my Bortle 8 back garden in southeast London. Processed in PixInsight.