Fifteen hours of the Eagle. Two crystal clear nights in a row, and no technological slip-ups.
Original image here
Unusually for us, a bit of PhotoShop finger-painting to bring out some of the ultra-faint stuff, and to increase the central contrast, but I don't think we've put in anything that isn't really there.
To our chagrin, this year's Eagle, though wider field, isn't really showing anything more sharply than our old STL-11000M shot. The main improvement is the inclusion of 6 hrs of [SII].
If we imagine that the dark wedge-shape top centre is the Eagle's head and razor sharp beak, looking down hungrily on the Pillars of Creation (one thinks of Prometheus), then there is either a giant pineapple ring, or more mythologically, a Sisyphean millstone, emerging above and to the right of the head. This structure and its surrounds is really fainter than shown here.
As always, we direct your attention to the tiny "Reluctant Parachutist", seen in profile, whose equipment has let him down, saying his prayers. The Parachutist is to be found to the right of the Pillars.
To the right of the Parachutist is some magnificent, swirly, wispy material strongly glowing deep blue in [OIII] which we haven't really noticed before.
To our left of the Eagle's beak is one standard magnificent dragon, facing to the right. It seems to have caught something to eat.
At the right of the base of the pillars is an H-alpha shock front forming a plateau, or ledge. This ledge is populated with various crouching hell-hounds, which luckily could be viewed as a distant city, with mysterious towers.
Finally, and marginally more scientifically, we note the strong OIII emission on streaming, steaming material evaporating from the "head" of the tallest pillar.
We've stretched the red and blue channels until the image is overall colour neutral. At 16 bits, the final image darks are not burned out, but reduction to 8 bits has clipped the very blackest bits.
3 nM filters. Green: H-alpha 3hrs; Red [SII] 6hrs; Blue [OIII] 6hrs. Aspen CG16M on 20" PlaneWave on MI-750 fork. Field 36'arc, 0.55 sec arc/pixel.