M16, The Eagle Nebula by Dick Locke
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M16 So Far: Ninety-Six Frames, 6.4 hours total exposure

The above adds 65x4 = 260 minutes (4 1/3) hours to the image below.  The latest shots used the Takahashi field flattener.  All the pictures from Sept. 2007 trip are here.


M16 So Far: Thirty-One Frames

M16, The Eagle Nebula in Serpens Caput, is where the famous "Pillars of Creation" live.  Can you see where they are, above?
Prime Focus New Frames: shots from the HAS site near Columbus night of 8/11/2007.:  ~23x4min = 92 minutes exposure at 800 ISO. Temps were around 79 F most this night, which is a major disadvantage when using my uncooled DSLR.   Object was low in the sky once again.  Canon EOS 20Da (unmodified), ISO , Takahashi TOA 130 (a 5" APO refractor), and Astro-Physics AP 900GTO mount. The image above was composed of new images as described, plus the DSLR images described below..


M16, The Eagle Nebula in Serpens Caput

5/19/2004, Davis Mountains, TX
45  minute exposure, STV auto guider
Losmandy GM-11
Olympus OM 1n camera, Takahashi F102 telescope with reducer, Kodak LE 400 film
Negative Scan, Nikon Coolscan IV ED, Processed in Photoshop; NEAT image noise reduction with some selective gaussian blur applied in the blue channel.

Notes: This is about a 50% crop of the full frame, resized to 800 pixels wide.   I apparently didn't have the EQ head locked securely locked to the tripod this night, as the next night I was able to shoot I discovered that it was loose.  I'm not sure if this contributed the the slightly out-of-round stars.  I would have liked to go a bit longer on this exposure, but clouds rolled in at 4:00 a.m. and sent me off to bed.  This is where the famous "pillars of creation" image from the Hubble is from; they zoomed in on the detail that's hinted at in this image..

Check out the single DSLR image at only 5 minutes, compared to 45 minutes above!!!  (at very bottom of page)

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