Messier 16 - The Eagle Nebula

Approximately 7,000 light-years from Earth lies a nebula that, second only to Messier 42, might be the most famous nebula of all! Messier 16, the Eagle Nebula. It owes much of its fame to a Hubble Space Telescope image of a small region within it, the legendary Pillars of Creation, a photograph that has become one of the most recognisable astronomical images ever taken, reproduced everywhere from textbooks to postage stamps since Hubble first captured it in 1995.

The Eagle Nebula itself is a vast region of ionised hydrogen gas and dust, spanning around 70 by 55 light-years, and it takes its name from the resemblance some observers see in its overall shape to a bird of prey with outstretched wings. And especially in the new Hubble iamge of this region, it really resambles an eagle. Embedded within this glowing cloud lies the young open cluster NGC 6611, positioned just above the famous pillars. The hot, massive stars of this cluster, some no more than a few million years old, are what illuminate the surrounding gas in the first place, ionising the hydrogen and giving the nebula its characteristic red glow. It is the same fundamental process I have written about before with other stellar nurseries, young, stars carving out and lighting up the very clouds of gas from which they themselves were born.

The Pillars of Creation, the small region within the Eagle Nebula that made it so iconic, are towering columns of cold molecular hydrogen and dust, the tallest of which stretches roughly four light-years from base to tip, taller than the distance between our sun and its nearest stellar neighbour. These pillars are dense enough to resist the radiation and stellar winds coming from NGC 6611, while the surrounding, less dense gas is stripped away, leaving these finger like structures. Deep within the pillars, dense balls of gas known as evaporating gaseous globules are collapsing under their own gravity to form new stars, quite literally being born inside these columns even as the columns themselves are slowly being eroded from the outside in. In Dutch the Pillars of Creation are known as "De Zuilen der Schepping", and I have always had a small soft spot for this translation, given that it happens to share its name with mine!

During the nights of 12 August 2026 and 24 August 2026, I headed out with my Askar telescope to finally capture this object properly. I had photographed it once before in the HOO palette, but now that I have the Optolong L-eXtreme and L-Synergy filters, I could not bring myself to finish my Messier Catalogue project without an SHO version of it as well, recreating that famous Hubble colour palette myself! Since this nebula is not visible from my balcony, this meant two nights of sleeping in the car next to a field under a dark sky.