The Eagle Nebula at top (aka M16) and the Swan Nebula (aka M17), straddling the Serpens-Sagittarius border. The star cluster below M17 is M18, while the small cluster above M16 is Trumpler 32. The Swan Nebula is also called the Omega or the Checkmark Nebula. The Eagle Nebula contains the dark towers called the Pillars of Creation made famous in the Hubble images. This is a blend of a stack of 9 x 8-minutes at ISO 3200 through the Optolong L-eNhance dual-band nebula filter, with a stack of 6 x 5-minutes at ISO 800 with no filter, all through the SharpStar 94mm refractor at f/4.4 and with the Canon EOS Ra camera. I used the AstroHutech filter drawer/adapter to aid swapping out the filter. Autoguiding was with the MGEN3 stand-alone autoguider. All images stacked, aligned and blended with Photoshop. I shot this set on June 14/15 on one short night a week before summer solstice from home at latitude 51° N, so the sky was never fully dark, making colour correction a challenge, resulting in a somewhat monochromatic look. In addition, the time to shoot was only 2 hours or so, limiting the number of sub-frames. Plus this field is low in the south from my latitude. Also taken on a very warm +24° C night for my western Canadian location, all without darks or LENR thermal noise reduction, as a test, just with frame-to-frame dithering to reduce thermal speckling which was abundant on the filtered high-ISO shots. Stacking with a median stack mode eliminated most, though not all, of the speckling.
This is the rich Eta Carinae Nebula area of the southern Milky Way, with the main nebula surrounded by a variety of open star clusters: NGC 3532 the Football Cluster, IC 2602 the Southern Pleiades, NGC 3293 the Gem Cluster. This is a stack of 4 x 3 minute exposures at f/2.8 with 135mm telephoto lens and Canon MkII camera at ISO 800. Two of the frames had some haze from passing clouds, which added natural star glows. No filter used here. The field simulates the field of view of binoculars.
The asterism of the False Cross in Vela and Carina, at left, with Gamma Velorum, a bright blue supergiant star, at right. In between are faint arcs of nebulosity in the Gum Nebula. To the left of Gamma Velorum is the open star clister NGC 2547. Below the bottom star of the False Cross, Epsilon Carinae or Avior, is the large naked-eye star cluster NGC 2516. To the right of the right star of the False Cross, Delta Velorum, is the loose open cluster IC 2391. This is a stack of 5 x 2.5-minute exposures with the 85mm Rokinon lens at f/2 and filter-modified Canon 5D MkII at ISO 2000, plus one exposure layered in taken through a Kenko Softon A filter to add the star glows. On the iOptron Sky-Tracker, from Tibuc Gardens Cottage at Coonabarabran, Australia.
