The Eagle Nebula, or M 17, presents a spectacular example of a star-forming region in the Sagittarius Arm of our Milky Way Galaxy. At a distance of approximately 7000 light years, it shows a mix of bright and hot young stars, and dense star-forming clouds. The center of the nebula includes the famous clouds sometimes known as the “pillars of creation” and were a target for the Hubble Space telescope and one of the most popular HST images.
This image was taken over many weeks in 2021 with our Nieves telescope from Soka University of America with the H-alpha filter which isolates emission from Hydrogen ions in the 658 nm wavelength. The H-alpha traces regions where electrons are recombining with protons and forming neutral Hydrogen, and represent boundaries of neutral and ionized gas in the nebula.
Paul Gardner, who made this image from our data, used the image processing program Pixinsight to combine the images, then further processed with Adobe lightroom, then with a new Artificial Intelligence noise reduction program that reduces the noise in the final image.