Amazing Sky by Alan Dyer

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.