A few years ago I got a Dobsonian telescope for Christmas, and ever since seeing the moon through it I’ve had a passion building in me to share that experience. In 2019 I decided to take the plunge into astrophotography. I bought way too much scope and mount for a beginner, so it took me a year before I could take my first photo of a deep sky object with them. Over the next year, though, I learned a lot about astronomy, and about what’s visible, both within and outside, of our own Milky Way galaxy.

The object that has become my favorite is Messier 16, the Eagle Nebula. Within M16 is sort of a star nursery. There, a dense cloud of hydrogen gas and dust, rotating at a speed that has created its own gravity, is pulling in more and more material and becoming more and more dense. As the density builds the cloud becomes hotter and hotter and eventually a protostar(s) will form. If one of the protostars pulls in enough material, and has enough mass, the temperature will get so hot that a nuclear reaction will begin, and a full star will be born. All of this is done within what we call an evaporating gaseous globule, an EGG. So, stars are actually formed within eggs. I guess we do know what came first. Sorry, chickens! Well, within the Eagle Nebula, this event has formed spire-looking structures, which we call The Pillars of Creation. From the moment I saw the Hubble image of The Pillars I wanted to take my own image of it. The Hubble uses narrowband imaging, a scientific imaging method, that allows us to visually separate out, or differentiate, the multiple gasses within a region. This is why the Hubble images are not overly red, like they would be from a one-shot color camera because of the amount of hydrogen and sulfur in space. And this is exactly what I wanted to do - how I wanted to image it.

So, here it is, one year and three months later, my first ever narrowband photo that I imaged and processed myself.