Image 1: Eagle Nebula, Messier 16 - Imaged 2021-08, Processed 2024-12
In mid August 2021 I dragged my telescope mount, scope, computer, batteries, tables, chairs, bug spray, etc., down to the waterfront at the cottage and pointed the scope at a gap between the trees to the south. I wanted to image the Eagle and Omega Nebulae which were not visible from the normal location near the cottage. The two nebulae sloped slowly from the East, peaking due South and then sloped slowly down to the West. I setup so that I would see the highest point midway through the trees around 11:30pm.
The telescope was the RASA8 which is not quite as good as my main scope today but it is great for large fields of view. It easily captured the two nebulae and other targets at the same time. I had my best colour camera by that point of time.
I processed the data in 2021 and it was okay but not great. Fast forward to 2024, cloudy December. I have been reviewing the larger and brighter targets and wondered about the Eagle. Can I redo those observations? Do I need to wait for August 2025? Can I reprocess that data? Was that data any good?
So here is the reprocessed Eagle. One advantage I have is that I cropped it to only the Eagle and ignored the other targets nearby, including the Omega. This meant I could fine-tune things for the Eagle.
The Eagle Nebula is a red Hydrogen-Alpha nebula with recent star formation in the Serpens Constellation. It also has some dust lanes and other features. It is at a declination of only -14, which tells you something about the forest I'm dealing with (it should be easily viewed from +45 North). It is famous for the features NASA called the "Pillars of Creation". NASA's image is considered one of the most iconic images ever captured by the Hubble Telescope.
The colours are wrong. I don’t know why, but I recall seeing this a few years ago when the channels (RGB) of the colour camera were messed up. It was caused by a bad setting in SharpCap and carried through the processing. In 2021 I must have figured out which channel was which, because the final image was correct.
The colours are wrong, but I like this image and I’m sticking with it. I may try to clean it up later. What I need is software that will take an BGR image and make it RGB – probably very easy to do. I can swap the channels but it would be a lot of work, and well, I like the blue version.
Eagle Nebula, imaged August 14, 2021 at Lac Teeples (at the cottage waterfront near the firepit). RASA8, ZWO ASI-6200MC Pro Colour Camera, 62 subframes of 1 minute. No Narrowband. A multiband filter may have been used (unknown). Reprocessed December 10, 2024. Colour channels out of order.
Comments