One of my favorite Hubble photos is the Pillars of Creation, which shows three large columns of dust and gas which is in the process of creating new stars. These lie in the heart of M16, the Eagle Nebula, which is a fairly bright emission nebula in the constellation Serpens.
Last Sunday night the skies were excellent for viewing so I headed down to the MAS Cherry Grove Observatory site. Despite a few technical challenges, I managed to get a reasonable image of the nebula.
This was taken with my Explore Scientific EF80 Triplet APO and my unmodded Canon 500D. I stacked 27 light frames at 90 seconds and ISO 800. I didn’t get any darks or flats due to dealing with dew forming on my lenses and everything else. The star bloat is really excessive so I’m working on improving my setup, polar alignment and guiding.