Stellar Shot of the Week: August 12, 2022

Using his Stellarvue SVX152T and the giant Stellarvue SFFX-2 field flattener, Jeff Weiss captured this unique image of M16. This image represents a work in progress. He removed the stars with Pixinsight and Starnet2. This is his first time trying this and according to Jeff the software was easy to use and the results were perfect. Since taking this image he has gathered 60 hours of RGB data attempting to get the stars to appear as close as possible to their real color. We look forward to seeing the final processing of M16 with the stars treated separately for more realistic color.

The Eagle Nebula, located in the constellation of Serpens Cauda. It resides in the Saggitarius arm of the Milky Way. It is about 6500 light years away and spans an area of about 55 X 70 light years. This is an active star forming region and there are perhaps 8100 stars currently associated with it. We wanted to share this unique image of the Eagle illuminated by stars that are not seen on this image.