|
|
| Messier #16 (M16), The Eagle Nebula, and Pillars of Life |
|
In the heart of M16, the Eagle Nebula, are the "Pillars of Life", the Hubble Telescope's famous mosaic of a star forming region of dense gas, and stellar debris. I didn't get too bad an image, for about one millionth the price. And I don't have a phalanx of Phd's to acquire my images or develop them. Hubble took their images through several narrow band filters to enhance the glow of certain elemental spectra and filter out the rest. That's why the stars are pinkish, and not so bright as they relatively are. Then they changed the color of some of the spectra to give an overall pleasing composition, and to help visually distinguish the elements. That's why the background is so greenish. My image is pretty much as it appears to our unaided eye from earth, if we could see in color at night. We can't, we see in shades of grey, but a camera can. My image is quite close to what it would look like if you were close enough for this to actually be your panoramic view. Then it would be bright enough to be in full glowing color. And it would be spectacularly clearer. Unfortunately, you wouldn't enjoy the view for more than a few brief hours, because within 3 or 4 you would be dead or dying. The radiation from the cluster of stars that are lower right of center, that have cleared out a pocket in the gas cloud they were born in, would do you in. The eagle nebula is highest in the sky around midnight in early July. It's about 13 degrees below the celestial equator in the middle of the swath of the summer Milky Way. It's a bit higher than many of the other well known nebulae in that area. It's about 6000 light years away in the next spiral arm in from us. M16 is actually the star cluster just lower right of center. The glowing gas of the eagle is cataloged as IC 4703. The star cluster is brand new in stellar lifetime years at about 5 million years old. The stars being formed in the columnar "pillars" are some of the newest stars and protostars in our galactic neighborhood. To give you an idea of the scale of the pillars and the view you're looking at, the image on the right is about 17 light years tall. The image on the left is 50 light years wide. By comparison, the nearest star to our sun, Alpha Centauri, is 4.3 light years away, about the height of the small right hand dark column. Although the star cluster can be found with binoculars, you have to know your way around that area to recognize or find it. The Eagle nebula shows up best in photographs like this. You'll need an 8" scope or better to see much nebulosity, and a 12" scope or better to pick out the pillars. |
|
10"
F6.3 Schmidt Cassegrain Telescope, Modified Canon 40D at Prime Focus, with Baader comma corrector and IR-UV filter |