Pretty much everyone has seen the famous Hubble image of the towers of gas within the Eagle nebula. With great results with my last nebula project, I definitely wanted to do another nebula, and Messier 16 was at the perfect part of the sky. A little work was required first, but once that was done, I spent three nights getting around 18 hours of data. It was all totally worth it.
I worked on improving my guiding a bit by adjusting the gear mesh on the axes and playing with some settings in PHD2. For how low it was in the sky, guiding wasn’t too bad. There is some atmospheric dispersion noticeable in the stars, but you get what you get. I have to keep telling myself, “it will all average out in the end.”
Behold, the Pillars of Creation:
