M16/ Ngc 6611- is located in the constellation of Serpens. Also known as the Star Queen nebula, made famous by the Hubble heritage image, "Pillars of creation". The actual 'Pillar' is a dark nebula, these extremely cold dark dust formations are consistently found  within star formation areas rich in hydrogen, like the horse Head nebula. The light of the nebulosity is made up of excited HII gas where its  ions have been excited  from surrounding stars within the nebula. Typically, the open cluster at it's heart would be contributing to much of this. It consists of around 60 stars of 8th mag., these are hot giants of spectral class O & B, born less than 1 million years  ago. The nebula itself was named The Eagle nebula from its shape shown in wider field images. M16 lies 8000 l.y. away.

 Conditions-As one can see by the dates, things have been rather poor this winter for reasonable skies. I've been finding holes in the clouds to get some images down. This image I only combined the Ha to the RGB and reduced the rgb's stars size to accommodate the Ha data..