Pillars of creation

Holy smokes, sometimes you just need to stop in your tracks and just behold the beauty, majesty and enormity of space. M16, The Eagle Nebula or more commonly known as "The Pillars of Creation" is probably the most iconic and well known images of deep space and the legacy of the Hubble space telescope. First captured by Hubble back in 1995. The "Pillars of Creation" is a star forming cloud of Hydrogen gas 90 trillion kilometers wide. The tiny section in the centre of my image resemble fingers, stalagmites of condensing clouds of Hydrogen gas and dust forever reaching into the darkness, lying deep within and not visible to conventional cameras are eggs or incubators of newly formed stars ready for birth in a few hundred million years.

The Black & White images here are my own from my 130mm telescope and cooled camera capturing light at the frequency of 656.21nm or the wavelength Hydrogen Alpha.

An ever increasing zoom into my image reveals the Pillars in all their glory. 

Seven hours of data capture this incredible region.

Finally I get to compare my image to the most celebrated of Hubble's images. With Hubble's final cost of around $10 billion and my modest set up around a million times less I don't think I have done a bad job.

NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) - http://hubblesite.org/image/3471/news_release/2015-01

The Eagle Rises

A short window of opportunity arises for some of our galaxies southern belles.
As wonderful my new site is I still have a restricted view of the south and thus
only a small time frame in which to capture any of the wonders here.I could not
even see antares from my previous location. So as you can imagine was quite frustrating
during the summer months. Due south for me now still lies above the town of Watton 3 miles away, sky glow is not too bad along with a never truly dark sky I have been careful in setting the right exposure. 26 minutes was all I could capture for this beauty. Having never imaged M16 before I was delighted to capture some of the ha I knew I couldnt push any harder as the test images were almost washed out. So here it is The pillars of creation set against a myriad of diamonds.