Emission nebula
Eagle Nebula (M16)
In Serpens (Ser) • Magnitude 6.4 • 35 arcminutes
Open the free AstroPlanner with Eagle Nebula pre-selected, scored against your telescope, location, and the live cloud forecast.
A young star-forming region 7,000 light-years away, forever linked to the Hubble Space Telescope's iconic 1995 photograph "Pillars of Creation" — towering columns of gas and dust where new stars are being born. The pillars are about 4–5 light-years tall, roughly the distance from our Sun to its nearest stellar neighbour.
Eagle Nebula at a glance
| Catalog IDs | M16, N 6611 |
| Type | Emission nebula |
| Constellation | Serpens (Ser) |
| Right ascension | 18h 18m 47s |
| Declination | -13° 47' 24" |
| Apparent magnitude | 6.40 |
| Surface brightness | 14.0 mag/arcsec² |
| Angular size | 35.0 × 28.0 arcmin |
| Max altitude at 45°N | 31° |
| Best imaging months | Mar, Apr, May |
How to image Eagle Nebula
Eagle Nebula sits in the constellation Serpens at right ascension 18h 18m 47s and declination -13° 47' 24". To frame and integrate it well, AstroPlanner will compute the optimal moonless window for tonight from your location, the field-of-view fit against your sensor and focal length, the suggested total integration time given your aperture and sky Bortle class, and a cloud-aware schedule that drops it from the plan if your nearest cloud forecast spike overlaps the best altitude window. As an emission nebula, Eagle Nebula responds very well to dual-narrowband filters under city skies.