M16, the Eagle Nebula, is a star-forming region in the constellation Serpens – the Serpent which is held by Ophiuchus, the serpent-bearer. I can see this object from my backyard for an hour or so before it is hidden by an oak tree. In that hour, I can take pictures of the nebula and its interior region that earned the name “The Pillars of Creation,” after a Hubble telescope picture revealed its filamentous dust lanes.
My image of the Eagle Nebula (see below) is the composite of 56, 6-minute frames (5h 36m of data) taken through my 130mm SVS astrograph fitted with a Triad quadband narrow-band filter. It isn’t the Hubble space telescope, but it reveals similar features albeit in far less detail.
Sometimes I want to believe that the kids at NASA are just amateur astronomers with much nicer toys, but that isn’t really a fair statement. They are professionals rather than amateurs – armed with a knowledge of stellar evolution, cosmology, celestial mechanics, and many other subjects not typically in the repertoire of even the most enthusiastic amateur astrophotographer.