Hand of God

The Eagle Nebula is one of the most well-known deep-sky object since the famous Hubble photo called  "Pillars of Creations". Another name of this object is "Hand of God" because of the dark dust clouds which form a giant hand scattering newborn stars to the sky.  My plan was to show this aspect of the wonderful Eagle Nebula.

For detailed scientific description of the object open the link here.

This project was my first try to photograph the Eagle Nebula. On the 7th of July I´ve had a perfect weather, new moon, clear sky and the most important: I was on holiday so I´ve had the whole night to take the time-consuming shots. A very good friend of mine came to visit me from England and it was a very good occasion to show him a typical astrophotographic session. Of course he helped me a lot during the night.

The telescope setup was easy at my favorite astrophotography place in the near of our home in Enzberg (see in Google Maps here). I do not use actually a GoTo System so I had to find the Nebula with Star-Hopping. After finding the constellation Serpens I was able to see the target object already in the finder scope. The final positioning and composition was also fast and easy. Unfortunately I cannot setup the auto guiding system correctly, therefore the upper limit of exposure time was only 50 sec at ISO 800. We´ve made about 100 light frames during the whole night fighting against falling asleep and wild animals...  At home I could use only about 30% of shots for the final stacking. During the postprocessing the original image had to be a little bit rotated and cropped for the final composition.

The final image is available in bigger size in the Gallery "The Cosmos" under "Deep-Sky"

Telescope:

Skywatcher Netwon 200/1000 Telescope

motorized Skywatcher EQ5 Mount

Canon 700D (unmodded) camera

Image:

23x50 sec light frames, ISO 800

30 dark frames

20 flat frames

20 bias frames

preprocessing in DeepSkyStacker

postprocessing in Photoshop