Messier 16: a wide view of the “Eagle Nebula” – 28 May 2017
For sure, Messier 16 in one of the most famous and beautiful treasures out there. It is a vaste region of star formation, including a nice open cluster (NGC 6611) and a wide nebula (IC 4703).
Messier 16, the “Eagle” nebula
This cosmic nursery is placed at about 7000 light years from us and it was discovered by Philippe Loys de Chéseaux in 1745-6. A binocular can easily show this complex, in the middle of the Milky Way, in the Serpens Cauda constellation. Wide field scopes, under dark skies, can make the vision mind-blowing, with plenty of details and countless stars.
The image above comes from the sigma-clipping combination of six, 120-seconds exposures, unfiltered, remotely taken with the 16″-f/3.75 Tenagra III (“Pearl”) robotic unit part of Tenagra Observatories in Arizona. The imaging camera is based on the KAF-16801 CCD. The resulting image scale is 2.4″/pixel.
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