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The Eagle nebula is an often imaged object. This image has several characteristics that make it special. It is the final result of a very wide collaboration between 54 students (6th Grade, 11 year old, Escola GEM -school year 2016-17, Mataró, Catalonia, Spain), their teacher (Aleix Roig, amateur astrophotographer), the Instituto Astrofísico de Canarias (IAC) through their project PETeR, the Liverpool Telescope, and myself, Josep Drudis. This image is the result of blending three 60 second frames taken with the Liverpool Telescope (80 inch, 2 meters) through a Hydrogen alpha filter and used as Luminance, three 5 second frames taken with the Liverpool Telescope, through a R filter (used as luminance for the stars), 14×30 minute frames in Ha, 16×30 minute frames in OIII and 6×30 minute frames in SII taken with the usual CDK 20″ (used for the color of the nebula), as well as 6×5 minute RGB frames taken with the CDK 20″ for the color of the stars (see this separate image taken with the CDK 20″).
The Project PETeR (Proyecto Educacional con Telescopios Robóticos, Educational Project with Robotic telescopes) aims to a narrow collaboration between the Liverpool Telescope and undergraduate students, by allocating brief accesses to them, in order to get “professional-level” images to be analyzed and processed by the students. The goal is to prepare scientific-minded students, as well as to awaken interest in this field of science and initiate future astronomers…
Image Credit: Liverpool Telescope (LJMU), the ‘PETeR’ (IAC) project, Aleix Roig, 54 6th Grade students and Josep Drudis (for the narrowband images (Ha, OIII and SII)).
Image Blending and Processing: Josep Drudis, Philadelphia, USA