M16 – Queen Nebula

This is an image of M16- The Queen Nebula. It’s called Queen Nebula because you can, with some imagination, see a lady holding up her hands and with a flowing gown. The area of her ‘hands’ were captured by Hubble Telescope and is well known as ‘Pillars of Creation’. These dense, dusty columns rising near the center are light-years in length but are gravitationally contracting to form stars. M16 and the Queen Nebula lie about 7,000 light-years away. The surrounding gas clouds are nebulosity full of hydrogen gas.

While I had taken this image in 2016, here is the image taken in 2020 in narrowband colors in Hubble palette. Took this image over 22 hours (37 images of Hydrogen Alpha, 14 images of Oxygen & 14 images of Sulphur of 20 minutes each.)


Here is a cropped version of this image:

The image below was taken in 2016 in regular RGB colors and was shot over 7 hours. (Luminance of 20 min each for 14 images, 9 images each of colors for 5 minutes).

m16_lrgb-1609

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