[dragnet2]

Thanks... Speaking of blowing up...Here is a shot I took a few months back of the Eagle Nebula, and then enlarged it below......

M16 otherwise known as the Eagle Nebula is about 7,000 light years distance from earth.

The Hubble Space Telescope obtained the famous photograph of this nebula, known as the "Pillars of Creation." You probably have seen it.

The dark tower of gas coming off the nebula, at center, is approximately 57 trillion miles high. This is not quite Hubble quality here, but the dark pillars can clearly be seen at the center of the image above.

Here below I enlarged the central region of the nebula where the "pillars of creation" that were made famous by the Hubble images.

This image was obtained with a Canon 40D, Astronomk LP filters, 6.3 focal reducer riding on a 10"SC telescope--45 images were shot RAW at 2.5 min exposures, then combined, calibrated and stacked using DSS.

[TigersEye]

That is amazing and beautiful. You have quite a nice hobby there. If you consider it a hobby, I don't mean anything pejorative in that. You may have said it in the specs you gave and I didn't understand it but I have a question. NASA often colorizes deep space objects to make them more discernible. Did you do something like that or is that its natural coloration?

Thanks for sharing and the ping back. Mighty big fire crackers out there.