Target: Eagle Nebula (M16)
Date: July 8th, 2026
Location: My Backyard in Georgetown, Texas
Sky Conditions: Clear skies, 78°F, Wind: 10-15 MPH, Moon: 42% illuminated.
Bortle Class: 5
Integration: 992 × 20 seconds
It’s been a while since I’ve been able to get outside in the dark and do any real astronomy. Honestly, it feels like it’s been either rainy or cloudy in Central Texas since March, and anytime we’ve had a break in the clouds I’ve been busy. So I took this stellar opportunity to get multiple telescopes out and make the most of the few clear nights I had available.
The first image I processed if from my Seestar S50 which I pointed at the Eagle Nebula (M16). I’ve been wanting to revisit this nebula for a while and took this chance to get some imaging time. As many people know, the Eagle Nebula hosts the famous Pillars of Creation which was made popular by the 1995 image from the Hubble Telescope.
While my smart telescope is quite modest in comparison to NASA’s space base telescope, it was still was able to collect a ton of usable data in the short 4 hours I had it outside imaging. I used the Seestar’s narrowband filter so I could separate the Hydrogen alpha and Oxygen III light emitted from this region so it could be later combined using a foraxx/SHO palette. This allows the coloring of the image to bring out these distinct regions of the nebula.
Full Resolution: https://app.astrobin.com/u/justin_the_dark?i=sidas4
I have a few more data sets to process from these nights sitting on my other telescopes’ hard drives. We’ve got another rainy week ahead of use here in Central Texas, so that should give me some time to process them in PixInsight.
I was previously sending out a single newsletter each month capturing all of the images from the past month, but with this weather pattern continuing and probably getting worse as El Niño intensifies, I think I’ll send out each post as an email. I don’t want to clog anyone’s inbox, but I also don’t think we’ll have enough clear skies for me to do so. Either way, let me know if it becomes too much.
Here’s some more info about the Eagle Nebula:
The Eagle Nebula (catalogued as Messier 16 or M16, and as NGC 6611, and also known as the Star Queen Nebula) is a young open cluster of stars in the constellation Serpens, discovered by Jean-Philippe de Cheseaux in 1745–46. Both the "Eagle" and the "Star Queen" refer to visual impressions of the dark silhouette near the center of the nebula, an area made famous as the "Pillars of Creation" imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. The nebula contains several active star-forming gas and dust regions, including the aforementioned Pillars of Creation. The Eagle Nebula lies in the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way.
Pillars of Creation is a photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope that depicts elephant trunks of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula of the Serpens constellation, some 6,500–7,000 light-years (2,000–2,100 pc) from Earth. They are so named because the gas and dust are in the process of creating new stars, while also being eroded by the light from nearby stars that have recently formed.
Source:
Post-Processing Workflow
Software Used: Siril & PixInsight
Stacked in Siril using Naztronomy's smart telescope script.
Cropped Image.
Applied AutoDBE and debanding in Siril. Exported .fit file for further processing in PixInsight
Applied BlurXTerminator at 50% stellar and 40% non-stellar.
Unscreened and removed stars with StarXTerminator.
Applied NoiseXTerminator at 60% on starless image.
Extracted Ha and OIII channels with DBXtract.
Used Seti Astro's statistical stretch 2.0.0 to stretch images.
Combined Ha & OIII with Foraxx Palette Utility.
Applied SHO palette with Narrowband Normalization.
Created Blue and Yellow masks.
Adjusted different regions of starless image with curves adjustment tool.
Adjusted final luminance levels with curves adjustment tool.
Used Seti Astro's star stretch script to stretch star image with color boost at 1.40 and SCNR checked.
Combined starless with image blend script.
Exported as PNG.
